Triage Emotions Wheel: What Am I Feeling?

The Triage Emotions Wheel is a decision-tree tool that transforms vague feelings like “stressed” or “fine” into precise emotional identification, guiding you through 126 possible emotions to the exact one you’re experiencing in under a minute. Think of it as the difference between saying “I hurt somewhere” and pointing to exactly where the pain is.

Most people operate with an emotional vocabulary of roughly five to seven words while simultaneously experiencing over 100 distinct emotional states. This gap between what we feel and what we can name isn’t just inconvenient; it’s actively holding us back from resolving conflicts, communicating our needs, and understanding what’s actually driving our behaviour.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” “Stressed.” “Tired.” “I don’t know, just… off.”

If these vague responses sound familiar, you’re not alone, and the cost is more significant than you might realise. When you can’t name what you’re feeling, you can’t address it effectively. You end up treating the wrong problem, like taking painkillers for a broken bone. Neuroscience research by Matthew Lieberman demonstrates that accurately naming emotions literally reduces amygdala activation (your brain’s threat response). The simple act of labelling an emotion begins to regulate it. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work suggests that people with higher emotional granularity make better decisions, regulate their emotions more effectively, and experience better mental health outcomes overall.

The Triage Emotions Wheel works like GPS for your inner world. Instead of asking you to pick from an overwhelming list of feelings or scroll through an abstract wheel, it guides you through three to four targeted questions that narrow down your experience with precision. You go from “somewhere on Earth” to exact coordinates; from “I feel bad” to “I’m feeling wounded because someone I trusted violated my expectations.” That level of clarity doesn’t just feel better; it tells you exactly what needs to happen next.

Anyway, here is the Triage Emotions Wheel. Have at it!

 

The Triage Emotions Wheel

How the Triage Emotions Wheel Actually Works

The genius of this tool is in its structure. Instead of presenting you with a random list of emotions and asking you to pick one (which would be overwhelming and probably inaccurate), it uses a branching decision tree based on how emotions actually work in your body and brain.

This is choice architecture in action – Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s concept from behavioural economics. The tool is a “nudge” that guides you to better answers without restricting freedom. Starting with 126 options would trigger decision fatigue and lead to poor choices. The branching structure reduces cognitive load while increasing accuracy.

 

The Philosophy Behind the Questions

The tool is built on three key insights:

First, it starts with your body, not your thoughts. Emotions generally begin as physical sensations like changes in arousal, energy, tension, and temperature. Your nervous system responds before your conscious mind has even labelled what’s happening. This is interoception; your brain’s sense of what’s happening inside your body. By starting with energy level rather than emotion names, the tool meets you where you actually are, which is in your physical experience.

This insight comes from neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory. Your nervous system has three states: ventral vagal (calm, connected, safe), sympathetic (activated, mobilised for action), and dorsal vagal (shutdown, conservation, disconnection). The first question essentially identifies which state you’re in. Are you activated? Calm? Depleted? Agitated? This is the biological foundation of everything else.

Second, it uses a branching tree structure that mirrors how emotions actually differentiate. Emotions aren’t random. They follow patterns, like a taxonomic hierarchy in biology. Kingdom → Phylum → Class → Order → Family → Genus → Species. In emotions: Arousal state → Core family → Middle layer → Specific emotion.

This is the fractal structure of emotional experience. This emotions wheel organises emotional experience into a coherent system. The structure isn’t imposed arbitrarily; it reflects the actual logic of how emotions nest and branch.

Third, it honours the primacy of first-person experience. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, insisted that philosophy must begin with what he called “the things themselves”, not theories about experience, not abstractions, but the actual texture of what it’s like to be you in this moment.

This is radical in a culture that often dismisses subjective experience as “just feelings”, as if feelings were less real than money or stock prices. But Husserl understood that first-person experience is the only thing you have direct access to. Everything else, like the external world, other minds, scientific theories, and even your own body, is mediated. Your emotional experience is immediate.

The Triage Emotions Wheel honours this phenomenological truth. It doesn’t tell you what you should feel. It doesn’t impose external categories and ask you to squeeze yourself into them. It asks: What is your experience, right now? What is the texture, the quality, the energy of what you’re feeling? And then it helps you find the word that fits your experience, not the experience you think you should be having.

There are no wrong answers because you are the only authority on your inner life. A therapist can offer interpretations. A friend can share observations. But only you have direct access to the felt quality of your experience. The wheel trusts that access.

The goal is honouring first-person subjective experience as the primary source of truth, because your lived experience of an emotion is more real than any external classification.

 

Question 1: Your Energy State

The first question is deceptively simple: What’s your energy level right now?

Your options are:

• High energy (activated, buzzing, amped up)
• Calm energy (settled, balanced, peaceful)
• Low energy (heavy, drained, depleted)
• Restless/uneasy energy (uncomfortable, can’t settle, agitated)

This isn’t asking how you feel emotionally. It’s asking about arousal, which is the most fundamental dimension of emotional experience. Before your brain categorises an emotion as “anger” or “excitement” or “anxiety,” your body has already made a determination: Am I activated or deactivated? Is my nervous system revving up or shutting down?

This distinction is called arousal in psychology, and it’s the biological foundation of everything else. High arousal means your heart is beating faster, your muscles are tense, your breathing is quick and shallow, and your attention is focused. You’re ready for action. Low arousal means your heart rate is slow, your muscles are relaxed or heavy, your breathing is deep or barely there, and your attention is diffuse. You’re in conservation mode.

This first question is also grounded in research on interoception (your brain’s sense of what’s happening inside your body). Interoception is emerging as an important concept in psychology. It’s not just “body awareness” in a vague sense, it’s the specific capacity to detect and interpret signals from your internal organs, muscles, and physiological state. Research by Sarah Garfinkel and others shows that people with better interoceptive awareness:

• Make better decisions (they can read their “gut feelings” accurately)
• Have better emotional regulation (they catch emotions earlier, when they’re easier to work with)
• Are more empathetic (they can simulate others’ bodily states more accurately)
• Are less prone to anxiety disorders (they don’t catastrophize normal body sensations)

The first question (“What’s your energy level?”) is fundamentally an interoceptive question. It asks you to feel into your body, not think about your situation. Not “What happened today?” or “What should I be feeling?” but “What is my body actually doing right now?” This is deliberate. Emotion begins in the body. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research confirms that emotions are constructed from interoceptive signals; your brain interpreting body sensations in context. By starting with the body, the tool meets emotion where it actually begins.

And over time, using the wheel trains interoceptive awareness itself. You get better at noticing the subtle differences between the tight chest of anxiety and the tight chest of held-back anger, between the heaviness of depression and the heaviness of simple exhaustion. The practice builds the capacity.

Why does this matter for health and fitness? Because arousal determines what your body can handle. High-arousal states can channel energy into intense physical activity (that activation needs somewhere to go, and training can be the perfect outlet). Low-arousal states signal that your system is in recovery mode, that your resources are depleted, that pushing hard will dig you deeper into a hole rather than building you up.

I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve worked with who try to force themselves through high-intensity workouts when they’re in genuine low-arousal depletion, then wonder why they get sick, injured, or burned out. Or clients who try to do gentle, restorative yoga when they’re in high-arousal activation and end up feeling even more frustrated and restless because their body needed to move hard and fast, not slow down.

The first question gets you in the right ballpark. From there, the tool branches.

 

Question 2: The Quality/Tone

Once you’ve identified your energy level, the second question asks about the quality or flavour of that energy. This is where the tool starts differentiating between emotions that share the same arousal level but feel completely different. For example, if you selected high energy, the tool will help you to understand: Is this a pleasant, exciting kind of activation, or an unpleasant, agitated kind? High energy can be joyful playfulness or it can be explosive rage. It can be enthusiastic excitement or it can be panicked anxiety. Same nervous system activation, completely different emotional experience.

If you selected low energy, the tool will help you to understand: Is this a peaceful, satisfied kind of low energy, or a heavy, depleted kind? Low energy can be serene contentment or it can be exhausted burnout. It can be gentle calm or it can be depressive shutdown.

This is where Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic thinking) and System 2 (slow, deliberate thinking) becomes quite relevant. Your first response to “how do you feel?” is System 1. It is quick, vague, and often imprecise. The branching questions engage System 2 (which is slower, and generally more accurate). But with practice, emotional granularity becomes more automatic. You train System 1 to be more precise.

The branching structure means that each energy level leads to different follow-up questions, exploring the specific terrain of that arousal state. The tool is mapping your experience, following the logic of how emotions actually differentiate in the body and mind.

 

Question 3: The Specific Emotion

By the third question, you’re getting very specific. The tool has narrowed down significantly based on your previous answers, and now it’s asking you to identify the exact emotion you’re experiencing from a much smaller set of options.

This is where the vocabulary really matters. You might be choosing between “hurt,” “wounded,” “crushed,” and “offended”; all in the same emotional family, all describing pain caused by someone else, but each with its own precise flavour.

Hurt is the general sense of emotional injury. Wounded suggests something deeper, more serious; an injury that needs healing time. Crushed is devastation, heartbreak, feeling utterly destroyed by someone’s actions. Offended is specifically about disrespect, about your dignity being impacted.

These distinctions matter. If you’re wounded, you need time and space to heal. If you’re offended, you might need to address the disrespect directly. If you’re crushed, you might need support from others to help you pick up the pieces. Same general category, different needs. Understanding your emotions is Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom). Aristotle argued that virtuous action requires accurate perception of circumstances. You can’t respond appropriately to a situation if you misidentify what you’re feeling. You can’t find the right response (not too much anger, not too little, but the right amount in the right context), if you can’t differentiate between explosive rage and cold resentment.

However, the issue with generic emotion wheels, is that they rely on you to actually understand the difference between each of these. It relies on you accurately selecting your emotion, which is the very problem you turn to an emotion wheel to help you with: you don’t quite know what you are feeling. So, the Triage Emotion Wheel handles this a little bit differently, and actually asks you clarifying questions at this stage. The logic of the tool then works out what you are feeling.

 

Question 4: The Intensity

The final question is about intensity: On a scale of 1 to 10, how strong is this emotion right now?

This is separate from identification because the same emotion can show up at wildly different intensities, and that intensity changes what you need to do about it.

A level-2 frustration might just need a few deep breaths and moving on. A level-9 frustration is screaming-into-a-pillow territory; that’s a massive amount of activation that needs a serious physical release.

A level-3 sadness might be a passing melancholy that you can sit with for a few minutes and let move through. A level-10 sadness is grief that’s going to knock you flat and needs dedicated time, space, and possibly support.

The intensity rating also affects the description you’ll see in your results. The tool understands that mild annoyance and explosive rage, while technically both in the “angry” family, require completely different language and guidance.

There’s also a deeper reason for tracking intensity, and it comes from the ancient philosopher Heraclitus.

“You cannot step into the same river twice,” Heraclitus observed. The river is always flowing, always changing. The water you stepped into a moment ago has already moved downstream. Emotions are rivers, not photographs.

You’re not “angry” the way you’re tall. Anger arises, peaks, transforms, dissolves, perhaps resurfaces in modified form. When you identify an emotion, you’re not capturing a permanent condition, you’re naming a current in the river at this particular moment. The level-8 anger you’re feeling right now might be level-3 in an hour. The level-6 sadness might intensify to level-9 tonight when you’re alone, then settle to level-4 by morning.

This process view is liberating. You’re not stuck with any emotion. You’re not defined by it. You’re witnessing a flow, noting what’s moving through right now. And like a river, it will flow on.

The intensity rating captures this temporality. It says: This is how strong it is now, with the implicit understanding that “now” is a moving target. You’re not labelling yourself. You’re taking a reading of a dynamic system. This is why checking in repeatedly matters. The river changes. Your readings should too.

 

Interpreting Your Results

Once you’ve answered all the questions, the tool gives you a comprehensive result with several layers of information:

The three-layer display shows you where you landed: the core emotion family (like “Sad”), the middle-layer category (like “Hurt”), and the specific emotion (like “Wounded”). This gives you context, you’re not just “wounded,” you’re “wounded” as a specific form of emotional hurt, which is a specific form of sadness related to loss and pain.

Think of this like coordinates on a map. You need all three dimensions to know exactly where you are in emotional space.

Context-aware descriptions mean that the explanation you get is tailored to the path you took to arrive at that emotion. Remember: “vulnerable” in the Sad family (emotionally exposed after being hurt) is different from “vulnerable” in the Fearful family (physically exposed to danger). The tool tracks your path and gives you the relevant description.

This is sophisticated emotional cartography. Early maps just said “here be dragons”, which is vague and unhelpful. Modern maps provide precise topography. Your wheel maps emotional territory with the same precision.

The intensity indicator reminds you how strong this feeling is and what that might mean. A level-2 hurt might need acknowledgment and self-compassion. A level-10 hurt might need you to cancel your plans, call a friend, and give yourself serious recovery time.

The visual emotion wheel shows you the highlighted path from core to middle to specific emotion, giving you a map of where this feeling lives in relation to all the others. This is useful for building your emotional vocabulary over time, and usually helps you to start to see patterns in where you tend to land.

 

The “Mixed Emotions” Feature

Here’s where the tool gets even more sophisticated. After giving you your primary emotion, it offers you companion emotions: other feelings that commonly occur alongside the one you just identified. This feature exists because mixed emotions aren’t the exception; they’re the norm. Human emotional experience is rarely simple. We don’t usually feel just one thing. We feel combinations, sometimes competing feelings happening simultaneously or in rapid succession.

The tool identifies these companion emotions based on common co-occurrences. Frequent patterns that show up again and again in emotional experience. For example, if you land on “Let Down” (a form of anger about betrayal or broken trust), the tool might suggest checking whether you’re also feeling emotions from the Sad family like “Hurt” or “Vulnerable,” because anger at betrayal very commonly travels with the pain of being wounded by someone you trusted.

You can explore these companion emotions to see if they resonate. Sometimes you’ll realise, “Oh yes, I’m not just angry; I’m angry AND heartbroken.” That recognition that you’re experiencing the classic “heartbreak cocktail” of anger and sadness together can be incredibly clarifying. It explains why you feel so complex and conflicted. You’re not confused; you’re experiencing a very common and understandable emotional mix.

The feature also helps when you initially can’t quite name what you’re feeling. You might start with one emotion, see the companions, and realise, “Actually, that companion emotion is more accurate than my first answer.” The tool lets you explore that second emotion as well, getting you to a more precise identification.

This honours the complexity of human experience. Like colours, emotions aren’t just primary colours. They mix and blend, creating new hues. The heartbreak cocktail isn’t just red (anger) or blue (sadness), it’s purple, a distinct experience that contains both.

 

Why “I’m Fine” Is Actually a Problem: The Neuroscience of Emotional Precision

Here’s something I’ve learned after years of coaching: when a client tells me they’re “stressed” or “fine,” I know almost nothing about what’s actually going on. And neither do they. That vagueness is often killing their progress. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But how do you examine life without examining the emotional experience that constitutes it? You can’t navigate toward the good life if you don’t know where you currently are. And “I feel bad” is about as useful as telling your GPS “I’m somewhere on Earth.”

Let me tell you about two clients I had last year; we’ll call them Mike and Rachel. Both came to me saying they were “too stressed to stick to their nutrition plan.” Fair enough, stress eating is real, and I get it. But when I dug deeper, I discovered that their “stress” was completely different.

Mike was overwhelmed. He had three major work projects colliding at once, his calendar was a nightmare, and he felt like he was drowning in demands. His stress had a frantic, pressured quality, like he was running out of time and couldn’t catch his breath. His eating pattern was grabbing whatever was fastest, skipping meals entirely, then binging at night because he’d barely eaten all day.

Rachel was exhausted. She’d been running on empty for months; poor sleep, emotional labour from a difficult family situation, and caregiving responsibilities piling up. Her stress was heavy, depleted, bone-deep. Her eating pattern was not eating at all during the day because she had no appetite or energy, then mindlessly eating in the evening while zoned out on the couch because her body was desperately seeking comfort and she had nothing left to give.

Same word: “stressed.” Completely different physiological states. Totally different needs.

Mike needed help with time management, batch cooking, and having grab-and-go options ready. He needed to channel that frantic energy into preparation during calmer moments. Rachel needed rest, boundaries, and permission to do less. She needed simple, nourishing foods that required zero mental bandwidth and actual recovery time built into her schedule.

If I’d just given them both generic “stress management” advice, I would have failed them both.

This is the diagnostic problem: imagine going to a doctor who diagnosed every illness as “sickness.” Broken bone? Sickness. Cancer? Sickness. Cold? Sickness. You’d never get appropriate treatment. Yet this is what we do with emotions: everything is “stress” or “upset” or “fine.”

This is why emotional granularity (the ability to identify and name your emotions with precision) matters so much in health and fitness. Because your body doesn’t respond to vague feelings. It responds to specific physiological and psychological states, and what helps one state can absolutely harm another. We’ve been conditioned to simplify our emotional experience. “How are you?” “I’m fine.” “I’m good.” “I’m stressed.” “I’m tired.” These are the default responses, the socially acceptable shorthand that gets us through casual conversations without getting too deep.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls this “emotional labour”; the work of managing your feelings to meet social expectations. Service workers must be happy. Women must be nice. Men can’t be vulnerable. We’ve been trained to perform “I’m fine” for social smoothness, even when we’re devastated underneath.

But people who can identify and name their emotions with precision, who can distinguish between feeling “anxious” versus “overwhelmed” versus “restless,” who know the difference between “hurt” and “disappointed” and “betrayed”, have significantly better mental health outcomes. They’re more resilient. They make better decisions under pressure. They regulate their emotions more effectively. They have healthier relationships. And from my perspective as a coach? They get better results. 

When you can name what you’re feeling, you can respond to it appropriately. You know whether you need to push through or back off. You know whether you need intensity or rest. You know whether you’re avoiding the gym because you’re actually tired or because you’re anxious about something else entirely and using “tiredness” as a convenient excuse.

Matthew Lieberman’s research on affect labelling shows that putting feelings into words literally reduces amygdala activation (the brain’s threat-detection centre). When you move from vague arousal (“I feel bad”) to specific identification (“I feel hurt and let down”), you’re engaging your prefrontal cortex, which then regulates the limbic system. Dan Siegel calls this “name it to tame it”; the act of labelling an emotion reduces its intensity.

There’s another neurological mechanism at work here, and it explains why vague emotions are so dangerous. Your brain has what neuroscientists call a “default mode network”, which is a set of brain regions that activate when you’re not focused on external tasks. This is when you daydream, remember, and think about yourself and your life. It’s also when you ruminate.

Rumination is the destructive pattern of going over and over negative experiences without resolution. It’s the mental hamster wheel, spinning on “Why do I always feel this way?” and “What’s wrong with me?” and “Why can’t I just be happy?” without ever getting anywhere.

Now, the difference between productive self-reflection and destructive rumination is often specificity. Vague reflection activates rumination: “Why do I always feel bad?” There’s nowhere for that question to go. It just spins. Specific reflection activates problem-solving: “I’m feeling hurt because of what she said yesterday, which connects to my fear of being dismissed.” Now there’s something to work with. The hurt has a cause. The cause connects to a pattern. The pattern can be examined.

The Triage Emotions Wheel essentially shifts you from rumination mode to reflection mode by forcing specificity. You can’t spiral into “I feel bad” indefinitely when the tool is asking you to choose between “wounded” and “offended.” The very act of differentiating interrupts the rumination loop and engages the problem-solving circuits. This is why precision isn’t pedantic. It’s therapeutic.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose work on how emotions are constructed has revolutionised the field, discovered something even more profound: emotions aren’t universal, hardwired responses that happen to you. They’re constructed by your brain based on prediction, past experience, concepts, and interoception (signals from your body). Your brain is constantly making predictions about what you’re feeling based on minimal data. Better concepts – better vocabulary – leads to better predictions, which leads to more accurate emotional experience.

Think about what that means. If someone could only see in black and white, they’d miss critical information, like the red of a stop sign, the green of a go signal. Emotional granularity is like gaining colour vision for your inner world. An untrained ear hears “sound.” A trained musician hears a C# minor seventh chord with a suspended fourth. You’re training your ear for your inner world.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took this even further. “The limits of my language,” he wrote, “are the limits of my world.” This isn’t metaphor. It’s literal. Wittgenstein observed that we cannot think what we cannot put into words. And neuroscience has validated his intuition, because languages that have words for specific emotions that English lacks (like the German Schadenfreude or the Japanese amae) allow their speakers to actually experience those emotions more distinctly. The word doesn’t just label the experience; it makes the experience possible in its full, differentiated form.

The eyes are not called the windows to the soul because emotions are transparently displayed there. We call them windows because when we look into someone’s eyes, we imagine what they might be feeling. We project inward from subtle cues and context. But the key constraint here is that you cannot feel what you have never felt. Your capacity to imagine another person’s inner experience is bounded by your own emotional vocabulary. If you’ve never differentiated a particular shade of feeling in yourself, you cannot truly recognise it in another. The empathy you extend to others is limited by the range of experiences you can access in yourself.

Consider the implications here. Your emotional vocabulary doesn’t just describe your experience; it shapes what experiences are available to you. If you only have the word “stressed,” you can only have that experience, even when what’s actually happening is overwhelm, or frustration, or anticipatory dread, or burned-out depletion. The emotion remains a vague blob precisely because you lack the word to carve it into distinctness.

You’re not failing to describe your experience accurately. You’re failing to have the experience accurately, because you don’t have the linguistic tools to differentiate it.

This is both the problem and the opportunity. By expanding your emotional vocabulary, you’re not just learning labels for things you already feel. You’re expanding the range of experiences available to you. You’re making new forms of feeling possible.

The research on emotional granularity shows that people with higher emotional granularity are better at regulating their emotions, less likely to engage in problematic coping behaviours like binge drinking or emotional eating, and more likely to use adaptive strategies when facing stress. They’re less reactive, more thoughtful, and better able to match their response to the actual situation they’re facing.

Think about what that means in practical terms. If you can distinguish between “I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well”, and “I’m tired because I’m emotionally drained from a difficult conversation,” and “I’m tired because I’m bored and understimulated,” you can make completely different (and more appropriate) choices. The first might need an earlier bedtime. The second might need a phone call with a friend or some journaling. The third might need a change of scenery or a challenging project.

But if all you know is “I’m tired,” you’re shooting in the dark.

This is what William James, the father of American pragmatism, would call a crucial distinction: “What difference would it practically make if this notion rather than that notion were true?” What’s the practical difference between “I’m stressed” and “I’m overwhelmed by demands exceeding my capacity”? Entirely different interventions. The first is vague and unhelpful. The second points directly to the solution: reduce demands or increase capacity.

The Triage Emotions Wheel is a tool designed to bridge that gap, and to take you from “I feel bad” to “I’m feeling resentful because someone violated my trust” or “I’m feeling drained because I’m carrying too much responsibility” or “I’m feeling insecure because I’m comparing myself to others.”

 

The Evolutionary Logic: Why We Have Emotions in the First Place

Before we dive deeper into how the tool works, let’s step back and ask the fundamental question: why do we have emotions at all?

From an evolutionary perspective, emotions exist because they solved survival problems. Each core emotion served (and continues to serve) a specific adaptive function:

Happy says “pursue this, more of this”: it’s your reinforcement system, marking experiences and behaviours that increased survival and reproduction.

Sad says “something important is missing, needs attention”: it’s your loss signal, slowing you down after a loss to conserve resources and reassess.

Angry says “this is not okay, needs to change”: it’s your boundary defence system, mobilising energy to protect your resources, status, or autonomy when they’re threatened.

Fearful says “danger present, take protective action”: it’s your threat detection system, preparing your body for escape or defence.

Drained says “capacity exceeded, need recovery”: it’s your resource monitoring system, forcing you to stop before complete depletion.

Disgusted says “toxic, stay away”: it’s your contamination avoidance system, keeping you away from spoiled food, disease, and social violations.

Surprised says “update your model, something unexpected”: it’s your attention capture system, reorienting you when reality violates predictions.

These aren’t arbitrary categories. They’re functional systems shaped by natural selection. You don’t feel sad about things you don’t care about. You don’t feel angry about violations that don’t matter to you. Your emotions are information about what your brain has determined is important for your survival, well-being, and flourishing.

But the challenge is that most of our emotional architecture evolved for ancestral environments: small groups, physical threats, food scarcity, and immediate dangers. Modern triggers activate systems designed for different problems. Social media comparison triggers the inadequacy response meant for losing status in a small tribe. Email overload triggers the overwhelm response meant for physical threats you couldn’t handle. The abstract worry about retirement triggers the fear response meant for predators you could see.

This is an evolutionary mismatch, and it explains why so many people are chronically in what I call “the 2025 burnout special”; depleted AND anxious simultaneously. Your body is giving you emergency signals for dangers that aren’t actually life-threatening.

I particularly like Randolph Nesse’s “smoke detector principle” here, as it explains why fear is so prevalent, and why certain things grab more of your attention: your fear system is hypersensitive because false positives (seeing danger that isn’t there) historically cost less than false negatives (missing real danger). Better to be anxious about a threat that doesn’t exist than to miss a threat that kills you. This is why your brain defaults to worry, it’s biased toward detection. But knowing this, and understanding that your chronic anxiety might be an oversensitive smoke detector responding to smoke from cooking, not a fire, changes how you relate to the emotion. It’s information, not a mandate. Your brain is trying to protect you, but it might be wrong about the level of threat. This same principle is true for all your emotions, unless they are properly calibrated. 

 

The Complete Emotion Atlas: Understanding the Seven Core Families

Now, let me walk you through each of the seven core emotion families in detail. These are the major categories that organise the entire wheel; the big buckets that everything else nests within. Each one serves a specific evolutionary purpose, and each one has distinct implications for your training, nutrition, recovery, and overall well-being.

 

Understanding the Fractal Structure

Before we dive into each family, let me explain how emotions nest in layers; what I call the “fractal structure.” Emotions aren’t flat. They’re hierarchical. They start broad and biological, then get increasingly specific and contextual as you move down through the layers.

The biological layer is pure arousal and valence; is your nervous system activated or deactivated? Is this pleasant or unpleasant? This is the raw material, the foundation. This is what your body knows before your mind interprets.

The categorical layer is the core emotion families; Happy, Sad, Angry, Fearful, Drained, Disgusted, and Surprised. These are the basic categories that appear across cultures (though how they’re expressed varies), each serving a distinct evolutionary function. Happy says “pursue this.” Sad says “I’ve lost something important.” Angry says “this boundary has been violated.” Fearful says “there’s danger here.” And so on.

The contextual layer is the middle emotions; the branches that differentiate based on situation. This is where “Angry” splits into “Let Down” (anger about betrayal), “Mad” (explosive rage), “Frustrated” (blocked goals), and “Bitter” (cold, long-held resentment). Same core emotion, different contexts, different flavours.

The precise layer is the specific emotions; the fine-grained distinctions that let you say exactly what you’re experiencing. This is where “Hurt” splits into “Wounded” (deep injury needing healing time), “Offended” (disrespect impacting dignity), “Pained” (ongoing suffering being carried), and “Crushed” (devastating heartbreak).

Why does this matter? Because the path matters. The same word can appear in different branches with different meanings. The tool tracks where you came from to give you the right definition. This is sophisticated emotional cartography, not just a list of feeling words. In Greek mythology, Theseus needed Ariadne’s thread to navigate the labyrinth. Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs through the forest so they could find their way back home; a trail of markers showing where they’d been and how they’d arrived at their current position. Your emotional life is a labyrinth, and this tool is the thread that helps you navigate it without getting lost. It shows you the trail of distinctions that led you to this precise feeling, right here, right now.

Now let’s explore each family.

 

A. HAPPY: The Fulfilment Family (Bright Yellow)

Core signal: Needs met, goals achieved, connection established, safety confirmed, desires fulfilled, competence demonstrated, future looks bright

When Happy appears: You’ve connected with someone meaningful. Your safety has been confirmed. Your desires have been fulfilled. You’ve demonstrated competence. The future looks promising.

Why Happy matters: This emotion family reinforces behaviours that serve you. It’s your brain’s reward system saying “yes, more of this.” When you feel happy emotions, you’re being told that something important is going right. From an evolutionary perspective, happiness marked the behaviours and situations that increased your survival and reproductive success.

From a coaching perspective, Happy states are the goal. This is when new habits feel effortless. When healthy choices don’t require willpower. When training is energising rather than draining. When meal prep feels manageable instead of overwhelming. My most successful clients aren’t the ones who white-knuckle their way through with discipline, they’re the ones who find ways to make the process genuinely satisfying, tapping into various forms of happiness to sustain their efforts.

Barbara Fredrickson’s “broaden-and-build” theory explains why: positive emotions don’t just feel good, they expand your awareness, increase your creativity, and build lasting resources (social bonds, skills, knowledge). Positive emotions can play a role in sparking not just motivation, but also actions that are productive and beneficial. Happiness isn’t frivolous; it’s functional.

 

Middle Layer 1: Playful (High-energy, uninhibited joy)

Characteristics: Spontaneous, energised, creative, boundary-pushing in delightful ways

Body signals: Physical lightness, bubbling energy, laughter, impulse to move and play

Common triggers: Social connection and fun with others, novelty and new experiences, freedom from constraints, creative flow states, games and competition

Playful is the high-arousal branch of happiness; joy that makes you want to move, laugh, try new things, and push boundaries just for fun. This is the feeling of being fully alive, uninhibited, free. Think of the energy of a great night out with friends, or the feeling when you’re doing something creative, and it’s just flowing, or that mischievous impulse to do something slightly rebellious just because it’s fun.

Specific emotions within Playful:

Aroused: Sexual or romantic activation; body and desire aligned, energy directed toward intimate connection

Cheeky: Impish humour; testing boundaries playfully, making jokes that toe the line

Free: Liberated from constraint; expansive sense of possibility, nothing holding you back

Joyful: Pure, uncomplicated happiness; bubbling up naturally without reason

Mischievous: Playful rule-bending; harmless troublemaking, doing something slightly naughty for fun

Spontaneous: Impulse without overthinking; alive to the moment, acting on immediate desire

When clients are in Playful states, they’re most open to trying new things. This is when I introduce new exercises, experiment with different training styles, and suggest new foods for them to try. The energy of playfulness makes novelty exciting rather than threatening. A client who’s feeling playful might say yes to that weird-looking kettlebell movement they’ve been avoiding, or agree to try a recipe with an ingredient they’ve never cooked with before, just because it sounds fun.

I also encourage clients to tap into playfulness deliberately when they’re feeling stuck. Put on music that makes you want to dance. Cook a meal like it’s a game. Treat your workout like play rather than work. Sometimes that shift in frame, from “I have to exercise” to “I get to move my body and see what it can do”, is a massive unlock.

This is the spirit of Nietzsche’s concept of “amor fati”; love of fate, joy in existence itself. Not because everything is perfect, but because you’re fully engaged with life as it is. It is Camus’ Sisyphus happy.

 

Middle Layer 2: Content (Low-arousal, settled satisfaction)

Characteristics: Peaceful, stable, sufficient, calm, quiet fulfilment

Body signals: Softness in the muscles, relaxation throughout the body, gentle warmth in the chest, slow and easy breathing

Common triggers: Basic needs met (fed, rested, safe), completion of tasks, present-moment awareness, nothing urgent demanding attention

Content is the low-arousal branch of happiness – satisfaction without excitement. This is sufficiency. Everything you need is met in this moment. There’s no striving, no wanting, no restlessness. Just peaceful okayness.

This is what you feel on a quiet morning with good coffee, or after a satisfying meal, or when you’re curled up somewhere comfortable with nowhere to be. It’s the emotional equivalent of a soft blanket.

Specific emotions within Content:

Pleased: Mild satisfaction; things going acceptably well, quietly happy with how something turned out

Satisfied: Fulfilled needs; nothing missing in this moment, genuine sufficiency

Serene: Deep calm; undisturbed tranquility, peaceful beyond just relaxation

Comfortable: Physical and emotional ease; relaxed security, safe and settled

Content states are where sustainable habits live. When a client tells me they feel content with their routine, not excited about it, not forcing it, just… satisfied with how things are going, I know we’ve found something that will last. They’re not riding the high of motivation or willpower. They’ve found a sustainable rhythm that feels right.

The challenge with Content is that it’s quiet. It doesn’t demand attention. It’s easy to overlook when you’re chasing the dopamine hits of Playful or Excited or Proud. But Content is actually the most stable foundation for long-term health. If you can find contentment in your daily routines (genuine satisfaction with your meals, quiet pleasure in your movement practices, peace with your body), you’ve built something that doesn’t require constant emotional fuel to maintain.

This is the Stoic ideal. It is not absence of emotion as some people wrongly think stoicism entails, but rather it is a deep peace that comes from living in accordance with your values. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” Content is what emerges when your thoughts are aligned with reality, when you’re not fighting what is.

Middle Layer 3: Proud (Achievement-based satisfaction)

Characteristics: Self-affirming, competent, accomplished, recognised, standing tall

Body signals: Chest expansion, upright posture, shoulders back, forward-leaning energy, sense of strength

Common triggers: Goals reached and milestones hit, skills demonstrated and mastery shown, obstacles overcome, recognition received from others, personal standards met

Proud is happiness rooted in achievement and competence. This is the feeling of “I did that” – satisfaction not just with the outcome, but with your own effort, skill, and perseverance.

Specific emotions within Proud:

Successful: Goal achievement; outcomes matching intentions, hitting the target you aimed for

Confident: Self-assurance in abilities; certainty of competence, trusting your own capabilities

Accomplished: Pride in both effort and results; sense of meaningful completion, satisfaction with what you’ve built

Triumphant: Victory after challenge; overcoming odds, winning when it wasn’t guaranteed

From a coaching standpoint, Proud emotions are rocket fuel. When clients experience genuine pride (when they see their own progress, when they recognise their own competence, when they accomplish something they weren’t sure they could do, etc.), it creates momentum that carries them forward for weeks.

This is why I’m religious about tracking progress with my clients, and not just weight or body measurements. Did you do a pushup from your toes when last month you couldn’t? Did you meal prep consistently for three weeks? Did you choose the nourishing option when you were stressed instead of defaulting to takeout? Those are achievements worthy of pride, and recognising them matters.

The key with Proud emotions is that they need to be earned. You can’t manufacture them with empty affirmations. Your brain knows the difference between real accomplishment and bullshit. But when you genuinely achieve something, especially something that required effort, that you had to work for, that you weren’t certain you could do, pride is the emotional reward that says “yes, you’re capable, keep going.”

This connects to Aristotle’s concept of megalopsychia; “greatness of soul” or justified pride. Aristotle distinguished between appropriate pride (based on real virtue and accomplishment) and vanity (based on false perception). Your emotional system makes the same distinction. False pride rings hollow. Real pride feels solid.

Middle Layer 4: Optimistic (Future-oriented positive affect)

Characteristics: Forward-looking, expectant, hopeful, energised by possibility, believing good things are coming

Body signals: Open chest, lifted gaze (literally looking up and forward), energised, lightness

Common triggers: Progress noticed and momentum felt, potential seen in a situation, encouragement received, vision clarified about future possibilities, obstacles clearing

Optimistic is happiness directed toward the future. This isn’t about what’s happening now; it’s about what’s coming. It’s positive expectation, the belief that things are moving in the right direction.

Specific emotions within Optimistic:

Hopeful: Positive expectation; believing good things will come, trusting the future

Inspired: Creative energy from vision; motivated by possibility, seeing what could be

Encouraged: Heartened by progress; validation that your direction is right, gaining confidence from signs of improvement

Uplifted: Emotionally elevated; lighter and brighter than you were, spirits raised

Optimistic emotions are essential for sustained behaviour change. Because the truth is that most fitness and health goals take time. You’re not going to see dramatic results in a week or even a month. You need to believe that the effort you’re putting in now will pay off later, even when you can’t see the evidence yet.

When clients are feeling optimistic, and when they’re hopeful about their progress, inspired by their vision, and encouraged by small wins, they stick with the process. They trust that consistency will compound. They’re willing to delay gratification because they believe in the future payoff.

The flip side is that when optimism disappears, and when clients lose hope, when they can’t see the point, and when they stop believing the future will be different, that’s when they quit. Not always immediately, but the emotional fuel that sustained them is gone.

This is where Viktor Frankl’s insights from existential psychology become very relevant: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Optimism provides the “why”; the belief that your efforts matter, that the future can be better than the present. Without it, even small hardships become unbearable. This is why I’m always looking for opportunities to build and maintain optimism: celebrating small wins, pointing out progress they might not notice themselves, helping them reconnect with their vision, showing them the evidence that their efforts are working even in subtle ways.

Middle Layer 5: Loving (Connection-based warmth)

Characteristics: Warm, tender, bonded, caring deeply, heart-centred

Body signals: Warmth in the chest and heart area, softness throughout the body, desire for closeness and physical proximity, gentle smile

Common triggers: Intimate moments with people you care about, care given or received, sense of belonging, appreciation of someone specific, connection deepening

Loving is happiness rooted in connection and care. This is warmth directed toward specific people; the feeling of affection, devotion, tenderness.

Specific emotions within Loving:

Affectionate: Fondness for a specific person; warm attachment, genuine liking

Caring: Concern for someone’s wellbeing; desire to help and support them

Devoted: Deep commitment; loyal connection that endures over time

Tender: Gentle, delicate care; soft emotional touch, protective fondness

Loving emotions might seem tangential to fitness, but they’re actually deeply relevant. Because the people you love are often the reason you’re trying to get healthier in the first place. You want to be around for them. You want to have energy to show up for them. You want to model healthy behaviour for them.

I’ve had countless clients who found their deepest motivation not in wanting to look different, but in wanting to be there for their kids, or to travel with their partner, or to have the stamina to care for ageing parents. When they connect to that loving motivation, and when they feel that warmth and tenderness and care for the people who matter most, suddenly the meal prep isn’t a chore. It’s an act of love. The workout isn’t punishment. It’s an investment in being present for the people they cherish.

Loving emotions also show up in self-care. When you genuinely care for yourself – not in a forced self-help way, but with real tenderness and compassion – the choices become easier. You feed yourself well because you care about yourself. You rest when you need to because you’re devoted to your own well-being. The inner critic gets replaced with an inner caregiver.

This is the Confucian concept of ren; benevolence, humaneness, the fundamental virtue of caring for others and yourself. In Neo-Confucian thought, self-cultivation isn’t selfish; it’s how you become more capable of serving those you love.

 

Happy Co-Occurrences: When Joy Mixes

Happy emotions often travel with other positive states, creating compound experiences that feel especially rich:

Happy + Surprised: The Delight Combinations

The delighted shock of good news. When something wonderful happens unexpectedly, you get the thrill of surprise combined with the warmth of happiness. This might be Excited + Playful (electric joy meeting pure delight), or Amazed + Playful (childlike wonder and fun together).

Like opening a gift you didn’t know you wanted and finding exactly what you needed. The surprise amplifies the happiness.

Content + Loving: The Secure Attachment

The fullness of secure attachment. This is the deep satisfaction of being with someone you love, needing nothing more than their presence. It’s not exciting, but it’s profoundly fulfilling. The emotional state of a long, comfortable relationship where you’re both peaceful and connected.

This is what attachment theory calls “secure base”, which is the feeling that allows you to explore the world because you know you have a safe harbour to return to.

Proud + Optimistic: Achievement Meeting Momentum

You’ve accomplished something significant AND you can see the potential for more. This combination creates powerful motivation, because you have evidence of your capability (Proud) and belief in future success (Optimistic), which makes you willing to take on even bigger challenges.

This is the virtuous cycle of self-efficacy from social cognitive theory; success breeds confidence breeds more success.

These positive combinations are worth savouring and building into your life deliberately. They’re not just pleasant, they’re the emotional fuel that sustains long-term wellbeing.

 

B. SAD: The Loss Family (Muted Blue)

Core signal: Loss, separation, unmet needs, value diminished, hope fading, connection broken, expectations unmet

When Sad appears: Connection has been broken or is lacking. Expectations have gone unmet. Security has been lost. Your sense of value has been diminished. Hope is fading about something important.

Why Sad matters: Sadness signals what matters to you. You don’t feel sad about things you don’t care about. The presence of sadness tells you that something important has been threatened or lost, and your emotional system is prompting you to reassess and seek reconnection or repair.

From an evolutionary perspective, sadness serves crucial functions. It slows you down to conserve resources after a loss. It signals to others that you need support (genuine sadness is hard to fake, as tears, facial expressions, body language are honest signals). It prompts reflection and meaning-making after setbacks.

From a coaching perspective, Sad states are where I see clients give up. Because sadness kills motivation. It depletes energy. It makes everything feel heavier and harder. When a client is in a Sad state, especially a deep one, trying to maintain normal routines can feel impossibly difficult.

But here’s what’s critical to understand: different types of sadness have different causes and different needs. The blanket advice to “just push through” or “focus on self-care” misses the specificity that actually helps.

 

Middle Layer 1: Lonely (Isolation, lack of connection)

Characteristics: Isolated, disconnected from others, unseen by those around you, forgotten

Body signals: Hollow feeling in the chest, heaviness in the body, impulse to withdraw (even though withdrawal makes it worse), slumped posture

Common triggers: Physical isolation and living alone, emotional distance even when physically near others, social exclusion, not being understood by people around you

Lonely is sadness rooted in disconnection; the painful awareness that you’re separate from others, that connection is missing.

Specific emotions within Lonely:

Isolated: Separated from others; alone in physical or emotional space

Abandoned: Left behind; deserted by people who mattered, actively rejected

Forgotten: Overlooked and not held in others’ minds; invisible to people around you

Disconnected: Lacking meaningful contact; going through the motions of interaction without real connection

Loneliness is epidemic right now, and it has massive implications for health. Chronic loneliness is said to be as harmful to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Now, how much you believe that is up to you, but the general idea that loneliness is more harmful than people realise is true. It increases inflammation, compromises immune function, disrupts sleep, and is strongly associated with depression and early mortality. 

From a training perspective, lonely clients often struggle with motivation because exercise feels like one more thing they have to do alone. This is where group fitness, training partners, or even just working out in a social environment (like a gym rather than at home) can make a massive difference. The activity itself might be the same, but doing it in connection with others changes the emotional experience entirely.

I’ve also noticed that lonely clients sometimes use fitness as a substitute for connection. They throw themselves into training because it’s something they can control when relationships feel out of reach. That can work short-term, but it’s not sustainable if the underlying loneliness isn’t addressed. Eventually, the training stops feeling like enough.

This connects to the Buddhist concept of dukkha, which is often translated as “suffering” but is probably more accurately rendered as “unsatisfactoriness.” The fundamental human condition is longing for connection, and when that connection is absent, we suffer. The solution isn’t to eliminate the longing but to meet it appropriately.

Buddhism teaches that much of our suffering comes from trying to satisfy inherently relational needs through solitary means, such as seeking in objects, achievements, or self-improvement what can only be found in genuine connection with others. Loneliness is dukkha in its purest form: the ache of separation, the sense that something essential is missing. The paradox is that loneliness often drives us deeper into isolation; we withdraw because connection feels risky or unavailable, but withdrawal intensifies the very pain we’re trying to escape. The Buddhist response isn’t to transcend the need for connection (as Western individualism might suggest) but to recognise it as fundamental and to actively cultivate it. We are relational beings. Denying that doesn’t free us; it traps us further in the cycle of unsatisfactoriness.

 

Middle Layer 2: Vulnerable (Exposure without protection)

Characteristics: Raw, exposed emotionally, defenceless, fragile, stripped of armour

Body signals: Contracted posture, protective curling inward, shakiness, feeling like you could break easily

Common triggers: Betrayal by someone trusted, disappointment in a relationship, emotional risks that went badly, trust being broken

Context note: This is Vulnerable as a form of sadness; being emotionally wounded and exposed after someone hurt you. This is different from Vulnerable in the Fearful family (which is about physical exposure to danger and feeling inadequate). Same word, completely different contexts.

Specific emotions within Vulnerable (Sad):

Fragile: Delicate emotionally; feeling like you could shatter with more pain, barely holding together

Exposed: Emotionally raw after being hurt; stripped of protection, defences down

Defenceless: Unable to guard against harm that’s already happened; armour removed, and can’t get it back up

Helpless: Powerless against pain; unable to protect yourself or change what’s happened

Vulnerable sadness shows up after someone has hurt you; after a betrayal, a harsh criticism, a rejection, a disappointment in a relationship. You’re not just sad; you’re emotionally wounded and feel unprotected.

This state makes everything harder. When clients are feeling vulnerable in this way, they often struggle with any situation that requires putting themselves out there, like trying a new exercise in front of others, asking for help, or admitting they’re struggling. The defencelessness extends to other areas of their life.

What helps: Safety first. Before trying to motivate someone or yourself out of vulnerable sadness, they need to feel safe again. They need to rebuild some sense of protection and control. Small, private wins. Low-stakes situations where nothing additional is at risk. Predictability and routine. Validation that what they’re feeling makes sense, given what happened.

This is where Carl Rogers’s concept of “unconditional positive regard” becomes crucial in coaching relationships. When someone feels vulnerable, they need to know they’re accepted without judgment, that their worth doesn’t depend on performance.

 

Middle Layer 3: Despair (Deep hopelessness)

Characteristics: Hopeless about the future, crushed, anguished, profoundly unhappy, unable to see a way forward

Body signals: Heavy throughout the entire body, collapsed posture, exhaustion beyond physical tiredness, crying (either unable to stop or unable to cry at all)

Common triggers: Major loss (death, divorce, job loss, health crisis), accumulation of setbacks over time, future looking bleak with no clear path forward, questioning whether life has meaning

Despair is the deepest branch of sadness; the feeling that things are fundamentally not okay and won’t get better.

Specific emotions within Despair:

Hopeless: Belief things won’t improve; future looks dark, can’t see a way out

Devastated: Utterly crushed; world-shaking loss, foundation pulled out from under you

Anguished: Severe mental and emotional suffering; tormented, in agony

Miserable: Profound unhappiness; pervasive discomfort, nothing feels okay

Despair is where I stop being a fitness coach and start being a human who refers clients to mental health professionals. Because this isn’t “I’m having a rough week” sadness. This is “I can’t see the point of continuing” sadness.

If a client is in genuine despair, especially if it’s lasted more than a couple of weeks, they need support beyond what I can provide. Exercise might help a little (there’s good evidence for movement supporting mental health), but it’s not going to fix despair. Therapy, possibly medication, and definitely social support, are the interventions that matter.

This is the existential crisis that Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death”. The despair of not being able to be oneself, of feeling that existence itself is wrong. It requires existential therapy, not fitness coaching.

 

Middle Layer 4: Guilty (Self-blame and remorse)

Characteristics: Self-blaming, regretful, ashamed, apologetic, feeling like you’ve done wrong

Body signals: Hunched shoulders, gaze directed downward, stomach tension and nausea, wanting to make yourself small

Common triggers: Harm caused to others (even unintentionally), personal values violated, disappointing someone who matters to you, mistakes made that hurt people

Guilty is sadness turned inward; feeling bad about your own actions or inactions, believing you’ve failed or hurt someone.

Specific emotions within Guilty:

Ashamed: Guilt plus embarrassment; negative self-judgment, feeling like you’re fundamentally bad or wrong

Remorseful: Deep regret about specific actions; wishing intensely that you could undo what you did

Regretful: Wishing you’d made different choices; hindsight pain, “if only” thinking

Sorry: Apologetic; feeling bad specifically about the impact your actions had on others

Guilt shows up constantly in fitness contexts, and usually in ways that aren’t helpful.

Clients feel guilty about missing workouts, about eating “bad” foods, about not being “disciplined enough,” about letting themselves or others down. The fitness industry has weaponised guilt for decades; the messaging is constant that you should feel guilty about your body, your choices, and your lack of willpower.

But guilt is only useful when you’ve actually violated your values or hurt someone. If you skipped a workout because you were exhausted and needed rest, that’s not a violation; that’s listening to your body. But diet culture has convinced people that self-care is something to feel guilty about.

I spend a lot of time helping clients differentiate between useful guilt (you actually did something contrary to your values and can learn from it) and toxic guilt (you’ve been taught to feel bad about normal human behaviour or needs).

Useful guilt: “I snapped at my partner because I was hangry, and I feel bad about hurting them. I can apologise and also notice that I need to eat more regularly so I’m not reactive like that.”

Toxic guilt: “I ate dessert at my friend’s birthday party, and I’m a terrible person with no self-control.”

One leads to growth. The other leads to shame spirals and disordered eating.

This distinction comes from cognitive behavioural therapy and Albert Ellis’s work on rational versus irrational beliefs. Irrational guilt says “I must be perfect at all times or I’m worthless.” Rational guilt says “I made a mistake that hurt someone, I can make amends and do better.”

Middle Layer 5: Hurt (Emotional injury from others)

Characteristics: Wounded by someone’s words or actions, offended, pained, crushed, feeling emotionally injured

Body signals: Pain in the chest, tightness, tears, physical ache that matches emotional pain

Common triggers: Harsh words from someone you care about, rejection, criticism (especially public criticism), betrayal, being dismissed or invalidated

Hurt is sadness caused specifically by someone else; they did something or said something, and it wounded you.

Specific emotions within Hurt:

Wounded: Emotionally injured by someone; needing healing time, carrying a real injury

Offended: Upset by disrespect; dignity impacted, feeling disrespected or treated poorly

Pained: Ongoing emotional suffering from what someone did; carrying distress that hasn’t resolved

Crushed: Devastated by a specific person’s actions; broken-hearted, utterly destroyed

Hurt is one of the most common emotions I see in coaching relationships, although it’s rarely named directly. A client will say they’re “frustrated” with their lack of progress, but when you dig deeper, they’re actually hurt. Usually by comments someone made about their body, by feeling invisible or undesirable, or by being rejected or dismissed.

The hurt is often old, sometimes decades old, but it’s still driving behaviour. They’re trying to lose weight because they’re still trying to heal a wound from someone who made them feel inadequate years ago, not because they genuinely want to.

This is where coaching becomes therapeutic (though I’m always clear I’m not a therapist). We have to name the hurt, acknowledge that it makes sense, and start separating “healing this wound” from “changing my body.” Sometimes the wound heals through self-compassion and processing, not through achieving the fitness goal that was supposed to fix it.

 

Sad Co-Occurrences: When Sadness Travels With Other Emotions

Sadness rarely travels alone. Here are the most common combinations:

Sad + Angry: The Heartbreak Cocktail

This is perhaps the most common emotional combination people experience: the devastating mix of pain and rage that shows up after betrayal, rejection, or deep disappointment.

Why these travel together: When someone you trust hurts you, your emotional system responds on two fronts. The Sad response is about loss and pain; you’ve lost the relationship you thought you had, you’re wounded by what happened. The Angry response is about violation; your boundaries were crossed, your trust was betrayed, this is NOT okay.

Both are valid. Both need space. You’re grieving the loss AND defending yourself against the violation. That’s not contradictory; it’s completely coherent.

Common specific pairings:

• Let down + Hurt: “You broke my trust AND broke my heart”
• Let down + Vulnerable: “Your betrayal stripped my defences, and I’m furious”
• Mad + Hurt: “I’m explosively angry and deeply wounded”
• Frustrated + Hurt: “Nothing’s working, and I’m in pain about it”

In coaching contexts, this combination shows up constantly. A client feels betrayed by their body (“I did everything right and it’s not working”). Let down by themselves (“I committed and then didn’t follow through”). Hurt by comments about their appearance while simultaneously angry about the injustice of it.

What to do with both: Honour both emotions. Don’t try to choose one or suppress one. The sadness needs space to grieve; crying, talking it out, and allowing the pain. The anger needs acknowledgement that what happened wasn’t okay and possibly needs expression or boundary-setting. Process them sequentially if simultaneous feels too overwhelming, but don’t skip either one.

This is what ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) calls “willingness”, making room for difficult emotions rather than struggling against them. The paradox is that acceptance of pain actually reduces suffering.

 

Sad + Fearful: The Insecurity Spiral

When loss and pain get mixed with self-doubt and fear, they amplify each other in destructive ways.

Why these travel together: External pain (rejection, criticism, loss) gets interpreted through the lens of internal fear (inadequacy, unworthiness). “This bad thing happened” becomes “This bad thing happened because something’s wrong with me.” The external event confirms the internal fear, creating a spiral.

Common specific pairings:

• Hurt + Insecure: “Criticism landed on my deepest wound about not being good enough”
• Lonely + Insecure: “I’m alone and convinced it’s because I’m fundamentally flawed”
• Vulnerable + Threatened: “I’m emotionally exposed AND don’t feel safe”

This is the spiral where sadness about what happened gets tangled with fear about what it means about you. “They left” becomes “They left because I’m unlovable.” “I failed” becomes “I failed because I’m inadequate.”

This combination is toxic because it turns situational pain into identity-level beliefs. And once it becomes about who you are rather than what happened, it’s much harder to process and heal.

What helps: Reality-checking. Separating what happened from what it means about you (usually nothing). Getting support from people who can offer a different perspective. And sometimes professional help is needed because this spiral can lead to clinical depression.

CBT is particularly helpful here, especially around identifying and challenging the automatic thoughts that turn events into identity statements. “I failed at this task” is not the same as “I am a failure.”

 

Sad + Drained: The Shutdown Response

When sadness meets exhaustion, you get protective emotional numbness.

Common specific pairings:

• Hurt + Bored: “I’ve numbed out to avoid feeling the pain”
• Lonely + Tired: “Too exhausted by loneliness to even reach out anymore”
• Vulnerable + Tired: “No energy left to protect myself”

This is the shutdown response; when emotional pain combines with depletion, your system sometimes just… turns off. You stop feeling much of anything. You’re not motivated, but you’re also not actively upset. You’re just flat, numb, disconnected.

The “Bored” emotions in the Drained family often show up here, but it’s not literal boredom, it’s protective dissociation. Your system has decided that feeling would be overwhelming, so it’s shut down emotional processing to conserve resources. This is concerning because it’s often a sign of approaching or actual depression. When someone is both sad and shut down, they’re at higher risk for not seeking help because they’re too depleted to take action.

This is polyvagal theory’s concept of dorsal vagal shutdown; the nervous system’s oldest defence mechanism, going back to our reptilian ancestors. Play dead when you can’t fight or flee.

What helps: Medical and therapeutic support, reduced demands, gentle reconnection with physical sensation (movement can help), and breaking through the isolation (even though that’s the last thing they want to do).

 

C. ANGRY: The Boundary Family (Classic Red)

Core signal: Injustice, violation, blocked goals, unfair treatment, expectations violated, boundaries crossed, autonomy threatened

When Angry appears: Your boundaries have been crossed. You’ve been treated unfairly. Your goals have been obstructed. Someone violated your expectations or trust. Your autonomy has been threatened or dismissed.

Why Angry matters: Anger mobilises energy for change. It’s your internal alarm system saying, “this is not okay”, and preparing your body to address the violation. Anger signals that something important to you has been threatened or harmed, and action is needed.

From an evolutionary perspective, anger evolved to defend resources, status, relationships, and autonomy. It mobilises physical energy for confrontation, communicates to others that a boundary has been crossed, and motivates corrective action.

From a coaching perspective, Angry states are interesting because they can either fuel progress or completely derail it. Angry energy, when channelled productively, can power through barriers and create change. But angry energy that has nowhere to go, or that’s turned inward, becomes destructive. The key is understanding which type of anger you’re dealing with and what it actually needs.

The Stoics had sophisticated views on anger. Seneca wrote an entire treatise on it, arguing that anger is never justified because it’s based on false beliefs about how things should be. But I think the Stoics missed something; anger as information is valuable. It’s the actions you take from anger that need wisdom.

Seneca’s concern was that anger clouds judgment and leads to decisions we later regret, and he wasn’t wrong about that. Anger narrows focus, distorts perception, and pushes us toward reactive rather than strategic responses. But dismissing anger entirely means dismissing crucial information about violated boundaries, unmet needs, and misalignments between how things are and how they need to be. The problem isn’t feeling anger; it’s what we do with it. 

Unexamined anger becomes rage, resentment, or violence. But examined anger, anger that’s felt, understood, and then directed, becomes a force for necessary change. The Stoic ideal of eliminating anger altogether risks eliminating your capacity to recognise injustice and respond to it. The better approach is to feel the anger, extract the information it contains, then choose your response with clarity rather than reaction. Don’t suppress the signal. Just don’t let the signal control the action.

 

Middle Layer 1: Let Down (Trust violated, expectations unmet)

Characteristics: Betrayed, deceived, disappointed in someone, used, trust fundamentally broken

Body signals: Tightness in the chest, heat rising up through the body, clenched jaw, tension in the shoulders

Common triggers: Broken promises from people you trusted, discovering lies or deception, inconsistency between what someone said and did, manipulation, unmet expectations from people who mattered

Let Down is anger specifically about trust and expectation; someone said one thing and did another, or you believed they would show up for you and they didn’t.

Specific emotions within Let Down:

Betrayed: Trust fundamentally broken; a core wound about someone’s trustworthiness

Deceived: Discovering lies; reality wasn’t what you thought it was, you were misled

Disappointed: Expectations not met; let down by outcome or person, things didn’t go as hoped

Used: Manipulated for others’ gain; taken advantage of, treated as means to someone else’s end

This is one of the most potent branches of anger because it’s not just about what happened, it’s about WHO did it. When someone you trusted violates that trust, the anger is sharp and personal.

In coaching contexts, I see this show up around broken commitments. A client feels Let Down by a friend who said they’d be workout partners and then flaked repeatedly. They feel Betrayed by a doctor who dismissed their concerns. They feel Used by a partner who supported their goals only when it was convenient.

But also, clients sometimes feel Let Down by themselves. They made promises to themselves and didn’t keep them. They expected themselves to stick with it, and they didn’t. That internal disappointment can create significant anger turned inward.

The challenge with Let Down emotions is that they often mix with Sad emotions (the “heartbreak cocktail”), creating a confusing swirl of pain and rage. You’re hurt AND furious, and both feelings are valid.

Dante’s Inferno is very relevant here. In his moral architecture of hell, Dante placed betrayers in the ninth and deepest circle, frozen in ice at the very bottom, below even the violent murderers. This is because betrayal doesn’t just harm you; it destroys the fundamental fabric of human relationship. It attacks trust itself, the foundation upon which all cooperation, intimacy, and social bonds are built. When someone betrays you, they don’t just break a promise, they break your ability to trust future promises. The wound isn’t just about what was lost; it’s about what becomes impossible afterwards.

Dante understood that betrayal is a category of harm that reverberates forward in time. It creates suspicion where there was openness, guardedness where there was vulnerability. This is why Let Down anger feels different from other types of anger, it’s not just reactive, it’s protective. Your anger isn’t irrational; it’s your psyche trying to ensure you never get hurt like that again. The question isn’t whether the anger is justified (it often is), but whether the protective wall you’re building is proportional to the actual threat, or whether it’s now keeping out connection you actually need. 

Betrayal teaches caution. The challenge is learning caution without learning cynicism.

 

Middle Layer 2: Mad (Intense, hot anger)

Characteristics: Explosive, intense, potentially violent (emotionally), “seeing red,” barely controlled rage

Body signals: Intense heat, adrenaline surge, muscle tension throughout body, loud voice impulse, urge to act physically

Common triggers: Witnessing severe injustice, experiencing significant violation, accumulated frustration boiling over, feeling powerless in the face of wrong

Mad is anger at its most intense; the explosive, barely-contained rage that makes your whole body vibrate with the need to act.

Specific emotions within Mad:

Furious: Extremely angry; intense heat and energy, near the edge of control

Enraged: Violent anger; barely controlled rage, impulse to destroy or attack

Livid: Furiously angry; seeing red, losing control of normal restraint

Outraged: Moral shock combined with anger; injustice response, “this is WRONG”

Mad emotions are the body’s emergency response; maximum activation, ready for confrontation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is the anger that was meant to be discharged immediately in physical action. You’re enraged at a threat, you fight it, and the activation resolves.

But in modern life, we rarely get to discharge Mad anger appropriately. You’re furious at your boss, but you can’t physically fight them. You’re enraged by an injustice, but there’s no immediate action that will fix it. So the activation has nowhere to go, and it either gets suppressed (which creates enormous internal tension) or it explodes inappropriately at whoever is nearby.

Mad anger needs physical discharge. This is where intense exercise is actually perfect: heavy lifting, punching a bag, sprinting, and anything that lets the body burn through that massive activation. But it needs to be done consciously, as a way to process the anger, not as punishment or an attempt to “control” the emotion.

I often tell clients that if you’re truly in a Mad state, you want to give yourself a minute before making any decisions. That level of activation impairs judgment. You’re in fight mode, and your prefrontal cortex is offline. Move the energy first, then think. During high arousal, blood flow shifts from the prefrontal cortex (reasoning, planning) to the limbic system and motor cortex (emotion, action). You literally cannot think clearly when you’re enraged. 

I see this all the time in my own martial arts practice; people get mad, and then start making mistakes. Anger makes you fast, but it also makes you sloppy. When someone gets frustrated during sparring (maybe they got hit, maybe they’re not landing techniques the way they want), you can watch their form deteriorate in real time. They start throwing wild, telegraphed strikes. They abandon defence. They burn energy inefficiently, gassing out in seconds. The angrier they get, the worse they perform, which makes them angrier still. It’s a vicious cycle. 

The best fighters I’ve trained with have an almost eerie calm under pressure. They feel the anger, and the activation is there, but they don’t let it hijack their decision-making. They use the energy without being used by it. That’s the skill worth developing: not eliminating Mad anger (you can’t, and you shouldn’t), but learning to feel the surge, acknowledge it, and then choose your response rather than being controlled by the emotion. In martial arts, that might mean taking a breath and resetting your stance/positioning. In life, it means recognising when you’re too activated to make good decisions, and giving yourself the space to discharge the energy before you act.

 

Middle Layer 3: Frustrated (Blocked goals, accumulating irritations)

Characteristics: Exasperated, aggravated, irritated, bothered, patience wearing thin

Body signals: Tension building, sighing heavily, restlessness, gritted teeth, mounting pressure

Common triggers: Obstacles getting in the way of what you’re trying to do, inefficiency and wasted time, repeated problems that shouldn’t be happening, things not working despite your efforts, lack of progress despite trying

Frustrated is the anger of blocked goals; you’re trying to get somewhere or do something, and things keep getting in the way.

Specific emotions within Frustrated:

Exasperated: Intensely frustrated by repeated obstacles; at the end of patience

Aggravated: Increasingly annoyed; small irritations adding up over time

Irritated: Persistently bothered; needle-prick annoyance that won’t go away

Annoyed: Mildly angry; patience wearing thin, mounting irritation

Frustration is probably the most common anger I see in coaching. Clients are frustrated that they’re not seeing results fast enough. Frustrated that their schedule keeps interfering with workouts. Frustrated that their body isn’t responding the way they expected. Frustrated that what worked before isn’t working now.

The thing about Frustration is that it’s cumulative. One obstacle? You handle it. But when it’s obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, the frustration builds until you’re ready to quit entirely. This is why small, accumulating setbacks often do more damage than one big setback; they erode your patience and willingness to keep trying.

What helps: Problem-solving. Frustration is goal-blocked anger, so the remedy is often removing obstacles or finding workarounds. Can’t get to the gym? Do home workouts. Meal prep taking too long? Simplify the recipes. Progress stalled? Adjust the variables.

But also, you need to have realistic expectations. Sometimes people are frustrated because they expected something unrealistic (30-day transformations, “easy” fat loss, no obstacles ever). Part of my job is recalibrating expectations so that normal obstacles don’t feel like failures.

This is where Stoicism becomes genuinely useful, and something I use in my coaching all the time. Epictetus said, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” You can’t always control obstacles, but you can control whether you interpret them as catastrophic failures or normal friction. This dichotomy of control is one of the most valuable lessons you can learn.

 

Middle Layer 4: Bitter (Cold, long-held anger)

Characteristics: Resentful, vindictive, cynical, cold, hard, holding grudges

Body signals: Tight and closed, cold rather than hot, hard expression, rigid posture

Common triggers: Unfair past treatment that was never addressed, unresolved grievances, patterns of being wronged, accumulated resentment over time, injustice that continues

Bitter is anger that’s gone cold; anger that’s been held so long it’s hardened into resentment.

Specific emotions within Bitter:

Resentful: Harbouring anger from past unfairness; holding onto grievances

Vindictive: Seeking revenge; wanting payback for wrongs done to you

Spiteful: Desire to hurt those who hurt you; malicious desire for harm

Cynical: Distrustful and pessimistic about others’ motives; assuming the worst

Bitterness is what happens when anger doesn’t get resolved. You were wronged, nothing was made right, and now you’re carrying that cold fury forward.

In coaching, I see bitterness show up in surprising ways. A client who’s bitter about past criticism of their body will approach fitness as a “fuck you” to everyone who made them feel inadequate, which can create initial motivation, but it’s ultimately exhausting because the fuel is resentment rather than genuine care for themselves.

Or a client who’s bitter about having to exercise at all; resentful that their body requires maintenance, resentful that they can’t just eat whatever they want, resentful that other people seem to have it easier. That bitterness poisons the entire experience. They’re doing the right actions, but the emotional context is toxic.

The challenge with bitterness is that it feels justified. You were wronged. You have every right to be angry. And yes, that’s true, but carrying that cold anger forward hurts you more than anyone else. It’s the emotional equivalent of drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Francis Bacon wrote, “In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.” Bitterness is the refusal to pass it over, and it keeps you chained to the person who hurt you.

 

Angry Co-Occurrences: When Anger Mixes

Angry + Sad: The Heartbreak Cocktail

We covered this from the Sad side, but it’s worth repeating because it’s so common. Anger and sadness together, the pain of loss mixed with the fury of violation, is one of the most frequent emotional combinations people experience.

Common pairings:

• Let down + Hurt: “You broke my trust and broke my heart”
• Let down + Vulnerable: “Your betrayal left me exposed, and I’m furious”
• Let down + Guilty: “I’m mad at you AND mad at myself”

This combination after betrayal or deep disappointment makes perfect sense. You’re grieving what you lost AND enraged that it happened. Both emotions are valid and need space.

 

Angry + Fearful: The Cornered Animal

When anger meets fear, you get the psychological equivalent of a cornered animal; fight and flight activated simultaneously.

Common pairings:

• Let down + Threatened: “Trust is broken and now I don’t feel safe”
• Mad + Threatened: “Dangerous situation triggering explosive response”
• Frustrated + Anxious: “Nothing’s working and I’m panicking about it”

This is a particularly volatile combination because you have high activation (from both anger and fear) but conflicting action impulses (attack vs. escape). People in this state often feel paralysed, explosive, or erratic. They can’t figure out whether to fight or flee, so they might alternate rapidly between defensive aggression and withdrawal.

In coaching contexts, this shows up when clients feel simultaneously angry about their situation and afraid they can’t change it. They’re frustrated by lack of progress AND anxious about the future. They’re mad at obstacles AND scared they’re inadequate. That combination creates stuck-ness; too activated to rest, too conflicted to act effectively.

 

Angry + Drained: Burnout Rage

When depletion meets irritability, you get the signature emotion of burnout; the exhausted rage of having nothing left to give while demands keep coming.

Common pairings:

• Stressed + Frustrated: “Everything’s piling up and I’m furious I can’t cope”
• Tired + Frustrated: “Running on empty and everything’s annoying”
• Busy + Frustrated: “No time and nothing’s working”
• Bored + Bitter: “Checked out from resentment”

This is what happens when you’ve been running on fumes for too long and your patience for anything is gone. You’re exhausted AND everything irritates you. Small things that wouldn’t normally matter – someone chewing loudly, a minor schedule change, traffic – become rage-inducing.

This combination is dangerous because it often leads to either explosive outbursts (snapping at people who don’t deserve it) or complete shutdown (I just can’t anymore). Neither resolves the underlying issue, which is that you’re depleted AND the demands haven’t stopped.

What helps: Rest is necessary but often not sufficient. You also need to address the source of the demands: boundaries, saying no, delegating, and often situational and cognitive restructuring. Otherwise, you rest briefly, go back to the same situation, and burn out again immediately.

 

D. FEARFUL: The Threat Family (Dark Purple)

Core signal: Danger (real or perceived), safety uncertain, future uncertain, inadequacy felt, vulnerability to harm

When Fearful appears: Threat has been detected in your environment or imagination. Your safety is uncertain. The future feels unpredictable and potentially harmful. You feel inadequate to handle what’s coming. You’re vulnerable to being hurt.

Why Fearful matters: Fear is your protection system. It evolved to keep you alive in the face of danger. It prepares your body for defensive action: fight, flight, freeze. Modern fear is rarely about physical danger, but your body responds the same way.

From an evolutionary perspective, fear is hypersensitive by design. Randolph Nesse’s “smoke detector principle” explains this: false positives (seeing danger that isn’t there) historically cost less than false negatives (missing real danger that kills you). Better to run from a hundred harmless shadows than to ignore the one shadow that’s a predator.

Roy Baumeister’s research shows that “bad is stronger than good”; negative events have more impact than positive ones of equal magnitude. This is why one critical comment can outweigh ten compliments. Your brain is Velcro for threats, Teflon for safety.

Modern cognitive science offers an even more precise view of what fear, and all emotions, actually are. The brain, it turns out, is fundamentally a “prediction machine.” This framework, developed by neuroscientists Andy Clark and Karl Friston, suggests that your brain is constantly generating expectations about what will happen next, and then updating those predictions based on error signals. You don’t passively receive information from the world; you actively predict it, then adjust when predictions fail.

Emotions, in this view, are predictions about the significance of events for your well-being.

Fear is a prediction: This situation is dangerous. Anger is a prediction: A boundary has been violated. Sadness is a prediction: Something valuable has been lost. Joy is a prediction: This is good for me; pursue more of this.

The prediction is often accurate. But not always.

Your brain might predict danger (fear) when the threat isn’t real, like an evolutionary smoke detector responding to smoke from cooking. It might predict violation (anger) when the situation is actually a misunderstanding. It might predict loss (sadness) when what’s actually happening is change, not ending.

This is where emotional granularity becomes super important. When you can name specifically what you’re feeling, you can evaluate the prediction. Is the danger real? Was the boundary actually violated? Is this a permanent loss or a temporary setback? Vague emotions can’t be reality-tested. “I feel bad” isn’t specific enough to check. But “I feel threatened” can be examined: Threatened by what? Is that threat real? What evidence do I have?

Specific emotions invite inquiry. They transform you from a passive recipient of feelings to an active evaluator of predictions. And sometimes, when you examine the prediction, you realise your brain got it wrong, and the emotion can shift accordingly.

From a coaching perspective, Fearful states are where I see the most self-sabotage. Because fear drives avoidance. If working out makes you feel exposed and inadequate (Insecure fear), you’ll find reasons not to go. If trying new foods triggers anxiety about loss of control (Anxious fear), you’ll stick with what feels safe, even if it’s not serving you.

Understanding which type of fear you’re experiencing is critical because different fears need different responses.

 

Middle Layer 1: Scared (Immediate danger response)

Characteristics: Frightened, terrified, panicked, horrified, confronted with present threat

Body signals: Racing heart, shallow rapid breathing, cold sensation, trembling, freeze response or flight impulse, wide eyes, heightened alertness

Common triggers: Immediate physical threats, jump scares, dangerous situations, phobia triggers, sudden loud noises or movements, anything that signals “danger NOW”

Scared is fear in its most acute form – the response to immediate, present danger.

Specific emotions within Scared:

Frightened: Afraid of immediate danger; threat is present right now

Terrified: Extreme fear; intense dread, overwhelming sense of danger

Panicked: Overwhelming fear with loss of control; emergency mode, can’t think straight

Horrified: Shocked and appalled by something frightening; fear mixed with disgust or disbelief

Scared emotions are the body’s emergency system. Your amygdala has detected threat and activated your sympathetic nervous system instantly, faster than your conscious thought. Blood flow shifts away from digestion and toward your muscles. Your pupils dilate. Your pain sensitivity decreases. You’re ready to run or fight or freeze.

In modern fitness contexts, Scared emotions are less common, but they do show up. Some people have genuine phobias around exercise equipment or situations (gym phobia is real!). Survivors of trauma might experience triggered fear responses in certain physical situations. People with anxiety disorders (especially health anxiety) might panic in response to elevated heart rate or breathlessness because their body interprets those sensations as danger signals.

What helps: For genuine Scared responses, you need to restore a sense of safety before you can do anything else. If someone is frightened or panicked, trying to push them through it will often backfire, as it confirms to their nervous system that the situation IS dangerous. Better to back off, de-escalate, create safety, then gradually approach again when they’re regulated.

This is the foundation of exposure therapy, but you can’t do exposure without establishing safety first. Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing approach emphasises titration (going slowly) and pendulation (moving between activation and calm).

Levine’s insight, drawn from decades of trauma work, is that healing fear doesn’t happen by forcing someone through it; it happens by teaching the nervous system that it can move between states safely. Titration means approaching the feared thing in small enough doses that the person never becomes overwhelmed; you stay within what Levine calls the “window of tolerance,” where activation is present but manageable. Pendulation means deliberately oscillating between that mild activation and a return to calm, so the nervous system learns it can ramp up and then come back down. 

This is the opposite of flooding someone with fear and hoping they adapt. Flooding often just re-traumatises, because the nervous system learns “I was right, this IS dangerous, and I couldn’t handle it.” What you want instead is a series of small victories: “I felt afraid, I stayed present, and then I was okay again.” Over time, the nervous system updates its threat assessment. The feared thing becomes less dangerous because your body has learned experientially that survival is possible. This is why patience matters with Scared emotions. You’re not working against stubbornness or weakness; you’re working with a nervous system that’s trying to keep you alive.

 

Middle Layer 2: Anxious (Anticipatory worry)

Characteristics: Worried, stressed, tense, apprehensive, mind racing with what-ifs

Body signals: Muscle tension (especially neck, shoulders, jaw), stomach knots or nausea, racing thoughts, restlessness, can’t sit still or can’t stop fidgeting, shallow breathing

Common triggers: Uncertainty about future events, upcoming situations you’re nervous about, potential problems spinning in your mind, things that could go wrong, lack of control over outcomes

Context note: Anxious can emerge from either restless/uneasy energy (physically activated anxiety) OR low energy (exhausted worry). The quality is similar, but the arousal level differs.

Anxious is fear directed at the future; anticipatory worry about what might happen.

Specific emotions within Anxious:

Worried: Concerned about potential problems; mind spinning scenarios and what-ifs

Stressed: Under pressure; system in high alert, feeling demands bearing down

Tense: Physically and mentally tight; wound up, ready for threat

Apprehensive: Nervously anticipating something unpleasant; dreading what’s coming

Anxiety is probably the most common emotion I encounter in coaching, and it manifests in countless ways:

• Performance anxiety: “What if I can’t do this exercise?” “What if everyone judges me?” “What if I fail?”
• Health anxiety: “What if my symptoms mean something serious?” “What if I’m doing damage?” “What if I never get better?”
• Social anxiety: “What if I look stupid?” “What if people are watching me?” “What if I don’t belong here?”
• Loss of control anxiety: “What if I can’t stick to this?” “What if I binge again?” “What if I lose all my progress?”

The common thread is uncertainty and anticipation of threat. Anxiety is your brain’s attempt to prepare for danger by simulating every possible bad outcome. It feels productive (“I’m being careful! I’m planning!”), but it’s actually exhausting and often paralysing.

What helps with anxiety: It depends on the type. Some anxiety responds well to information and planning; if you’re worried about a specific situation, having a clear plan can reduce the uncertainty. Some anxiety responds to physical discharge; movement helps burn off the activation. Some anxiety responds to grounding techniques; bringing your attention to present-moment sensory experience rather than future what-ifs.

But sometimes anxiety needs professional help, especially if it’s chronic, intense, or interfering significantly with your life. Generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder, specific phobias, these aren’t things you just push through with willpower.

This is where cognitive behavioural therapy shines. Identifying the catastrophic predictions (“If I go to the gym, everyone will judge me and I’ll humiliate myself”) and reality-testing them. Byron Katie’s “The Work” uses a similar approach: Is it true? Can you absolutely know it’s true? What happens when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought?

Now, some of “The Work” is a bit out there, but the 4 question framework can be quite helpful, especially if you don’t have access to more qualified help. 

 

Middle Layer 3: Insecure (Self-focused fear)

Characteristics: Inadequate, uncertain about self, self-conscious, timid, lacking confidence

Body signals: Inward focus, shrinking into yourself, avoiding eye contact, making yourself small, shallow breathing

Common triggers: Social situations where you feel evaluated, comparison to others, criticism (anticipated or received), performance situations, feeling not good enough

Insecure is fear focused on yourself; the worry that you’re inadequate, that you don’t measure up, that something is wrong with you.

Specific emotions within Insecure:

Inadequate: Not good enough; insufficient, lacking what’s needed

Uncertain: Lacking confidence in yourself; doubtful about your capabilities

Self-conscious: Uncomfortably aware of yourself in social context; feeling watched and judged

Timid: Lacking courage; shy and fearful, holding back

Insecurity is absolutely rampant in fitness contexts. The entire industry is built on making people feel inadequate so they’ll buy solutions. And gyms, group classes, and social media are environments ripe for comparison and self-consciousness.

Clients feel Inadequate because they can’t lift as much as others. Self-conscious because they think everyone’s judging their body or form. Uncertain because they don’t know if they’re doing it “right.” Timid about trying new things because they might fail or look foolish.

This is where having a good coach or supportive environment makes all the difference. Insecurity thrives in isolation and comparison. It shrinks in the presence of genuine support, normalisation, and repeated evidence of capability.

The strategy: Small wins that build evidence. If you feel inadequate, you need experiences that prove you ARE adequate, but they need to be believable. Tiny successful steps that gradually build a different story about who you are and what you can do.

This connects to Albert Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy, and your belief in your ability to succeed. Self-efficacy is built through mastery experiences (actually succeeding), vicarious experiences (seeing similar others succeed), social persuasion (encouragement from others), and physiological states (interpreting your physical sensations accurately rather than catastrophically).

 

Middle Layer 4: Threatened (External danger to safety)

Characteristics: Unsafe, endangered, vulnerable to harm, exposed to risk

Body signals: Hyper-vigilance, constantly scanning environment, protective posture, guarded, ready to defend

Common triggers: Actually dangerous situations, feeling targeted by someone, lack of protection or security, unsafe environments, being in harm’s way

Context note: “Vulnerable” here means physically exposed to danger; different from Vulnerable in the Sad family (emotionally wounded after being hurt).

Threatened is fear based on actual or perceived danger in your environment; you don’t feel safe.

Specific emotions within Threatened:

Unsafe: At risk of harm; security compromised, danger present

Endangered: In a situation where harm could occur; at risk

Vulnerable: Exposed and susceptible to being hurt; unprotected (this is physical/situational vulnerability, not emotional)

Exposed: No protection; open to potential danger, defenceless

Threatened emotions are less common in typical coaching contexts, but they show up more than you might think:

• Survivors of assault or abuse may feel Threatened in vulnerable physical positions (lying down for floor exercises) or in environments where they can’t see exits
• People in actually unsafe neighbourhoods may feel Threatened going for outdoor runs
• Those experiencing harassment might feel Threatened in public spaces like gyms
• Anyone with PTSD can have threat responses triggered by specific stimuli

When someone feels genuinely Threatened, their first need is actual safety, or the restoration of a sense of safety. You can’t coach through a threat response. You have to address the safety concern first, whether that means changing environments, having protection present, or working with trauma-informed professionals.

 

Fearful Co-Occurrences: When Fear Mixes

Fearful + Drained: The Modern Burnout

This is the signature emotional state of modern life – anxiety meeting exhaustion.

Common pairings:

• Anxious + Stressed: “Overload plus panic; drowning in demands”
• Anxious + Tired: “Exhausted but brain won’t stop danger-scanning”
• Anxious + Bored: “Numb on the surface, quietly terrified underneath”

This combination is epidemic-level common right now. You’re running on empty AND you’re worried about everything. You’re too tired to function well but too anxious to rest. Your body is screaming for recovery but your brain is screaming about all the threats and demands.

This is particularly insidious because each emotion makes the other worse. Anxiety disrupts sleep, which increases exhaustion, which impairs coping, which increases anxiety. Stress depletes your resources, which makes you more reactive to threats, which creates more stress. It’s a reinforcing feedback loop. Applying a systems thinking lens, we can see how these create vicious cycles that are hard to escape without changing the system itself.

Breaking this cycle requires addressing both sides: reducing actual demands (not just trying to cope better with overwhelming demands) AND regulating the nervous system (teaching your threat-detection system to calm down).

This is the “allostatic load” concept from physiology. Allostatic load is what happens when your body’s stress response systems (designed for short-term emergency activation) are forced to run continuously. Cortisol stays elevated. Inflammation becomes chronic. Blood pressure remains high. Sleep architecture deteriorates. Your HPA axis (the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system that manages stress hormones) stops responding appropriately; it becomes either hyper-reactive (spiking at minor stressors) or blunted (unable to mount necessary responses). This isn’t weakness or poor coping, it’s what happens when biological systems designed for acute threats are subjected to chronic activation. Your body literally wears out from being in emergency mode too long.

The tragic irony is that high allostatic load makes you less capable of doing the things that would reduce it. You’re too exhausted to exercise, too wired to sleep, too depleted to make good decisions about boundaries or priorities. This is why “just manage your stress better” advice is useless here. The system is broken, not the person. What’s needed is systemic intervention: actually removing demands (not optimising your response to impossible demands), actively down-regulating the nervous system (through practices that restore parasympathetic tone), and often, external support because you genuinely cannot think or resource your way out of this state alone. 

The Stressed + Anxious combination isn’t a personal failure. It’s what happens when human biology meets modern life’s unrelenting demands without adequate recovery. Recognising that is the first step toward actually addressing it.

 

Fearful + Sad: The Insecurity-Rejection Spiral

When fear about yourself meets pain from others, they amplify each other in devastating ways.

Common pairings:

• Insecure + Hurt: “Criticism landed on my deepest wound about not being enough”
• Insecure + Lonely: “I’m alone and convinced it’s because I’m fundamentally flawed”
• Threatened + Vulnerable: “Unsafe AND emotionally exposed”

This is the spiral where external events (rejection, criticism, isolation) get interpreted through the lens of internal inadequacy. “They rejected me” becomes “They rejected me because I’m not good enough.” The external pain confirms the internal fear, and now you have double the wound.

This combination often shows up in body image issues. Someone makes a comment about your body (Hurt). Your existing insecurity interprets this as confirmation that you’re inadequate (Insecure). Now you’re both wounded by what they said AND convinced it’s true, which is much harder to recover from than either emotion alone.

This is the cognitive fusion that ACT talks about. When you become fused with your thoughts, and “I’m having the thought that I’m inadequate” becomes “I AM inadequate.” The thought becomes reality in your experience.

 

Fearful + Angry: The Cornered Animal

We covered this from the Angry side; it’s the volatile mix of simultaneous attack and escape impulses.

Common pairings:

• Threatened + Mad: “Dangerous situation triggering explosive response”
• Anxious + Frustrated: “Worry and irritation in feedback loop”

When you feel both threatened and enraged, you’re in the most dangerous emotional state – you’re activated for confrontation but also afraid, which makes your responses unpredictable and often disproportionate.

In the animal kingdom, a cornered animal is the most dangerous. The same principle applies emotionally.

 

E. DRAINED: The Depletion Family (Lifeless Grey)

Core signal: Resource exhaustion, capacity exceeded, energy depleted

When Drained appears: Your energy has been depleted. Demands are exceeding your capacity. You’re overstimulated or understimulated. Burnout is approaching or already here.

Why Drained matters: This family is often overlooked in traditional emotion models, but it’s absolutely critical for modern life. We’re living in a state of chronic resource depletion; too much information, too many demands, too little rest, and too much stimulation. Drained emotions are your system’s way of saying “I have nothing left”, or “I need less”, or “I’m completely overwhelmed.”

From an evolutionary perspective, depletion signals forced our ancestors to rest and recover. You can’t hunt effectively when exhausted. You can’t gather food when depleted. You can’t fight or flee when you have no energy. Rest wasn’t optional; it was survival.

But modern life has largely eliminated the forcing function. You can be chronically depleted and still function (poorly). Coffee, energy drinks, stimulants and lots of willpower; we’ve found ways to override the depletion signals, at least temporarily. But the bill always comes due, usually in the form of illness, injury, or complete breakdown.

From a coaching perspective, Drained states are where programs fall apart, because the client has no capacity. When someone is truly depleted, they don’t need motivation or accountability; they need less on their plate.

 

Middle Layer 1: Tired (Physical/mental exhaustion)

Characteristics: Exhausted, drained of vitality, fatigued, weary in body and spirit

Body signals: Heavy limbs, brain fog, desperate need for rest, yawning, everything feels effortful

Common triggers: Lack of sleep, sustained physical or mental effort, emotional labour, illness, caregiving responsibilities

Tired is straightforward depletion; your resources are gone, and you need to replenish.

Specific emotions within Tired:

Exhausted: Completely worn out; desperately needing rest, nothing left in the tank

Drained: Depleted of vitality; nothing left to give, system running on empty

Fatigued: Extreme tiredness from exertion or stress; bone-deep weariness

Weary: Tired in body AND spirit; worn down over time, not just physically tired

This is the most obvious branch of Drained; simple resource depletion. When clients tell me they’re too tired to work out, this is usually what they mean. They haven’t slept enough, they’ve been working too much, they’ve been sick, and/or they’re in a demanding life phase. They literally don’t have the resources.

What helps: Rest. Actual rest, not just “less intense” exercise. Sleep, downtime, reduced demands. This seems obvious, but I constantly see people trying to push through genuine exhaustion with willpower, and it never works. You can white-knuckle for a while, but eventually your system forces the issue with illness or injury or complete shutdown.

The tricky part is distinguishing genuine Tired (resource depletion needing rest) from other states that feel like tiredness but are actually something else like depression (which feels like tiredness but doesn’t improve with rest), anxiety (which disrupts rest so you can’t recover properly), or Bored (which is numbness/disconnection, not actual depletion).

 

Middle Layer 2: Stressed (Demand overload)

Characteristics: Overwhelmed by demands, burdened, taxed, strained to limits

Body signals: Tension throughout body, pressure sensation (like weight pressing down), shallow breathing, tight chest

Common triggers: Too many responsibilities, time pressure, competing demands, lack of support, demands exceeding capacity

Context note: This is different from Anxious-Stressed (anticipatory worry about future demands). This is actual present-moment overload; the demands are here NOW and they’re too much.

Stressed is about the gap between what’s required of you and what you have capacity for.

Specific emotions within Stressed:

Overwhelmed: Unable to cope with demands; system overload, drowning

Burdened: Weighed down by responsibilities; heavy load you’re carrying

Taxed: Stretched to limits; capacity maxed out, running at maximum

Strained: Under excessive pressure; about to break under the load

This is probably the second-most common emotion I see (after various forms of anxiety/insecurity). Clients are Overwhelmed by trying to balance work, family, fitness, nutrition, sleep, social life, and personal growth. They’re Burdened by responsibilities that don’t stop. They’re Taxed by doing too much with too little support. They’re Strained to the breaking point.

The fitness industry’s answer to Stressed is usually “stress management” techniques like meditation, deep breathing, and yoga. And yes, these can help regulate your nervous system. But they don’t reduce the actual demands.

If you’re Overwhelmed because you’re working 60 hours a week while caring for ageing parents while raising kids while trying to maintain a relationship while trying to exercise regularly while trying to eat well while trying to sleep enough… breathing exercises aren’t going to fix that. You have too much on your plate. The problem isn’t your stress response; it’s the unsustainable load.

What actually helps: Reducing demands. Saying no. Delegating. Letting some things go. Lowering standards in some areas so you have capacity for others. This is incredibly hard because it often means disappointing people or accepting that you can’t do everything, but it’s the only thing that actually resolves Stressed states.

Essentialism (Greg McKeown) is quite relevant here. This is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not doing more things better, but doing fewer things. Trade-offs, not having it all. McKeown’s central argument is that the word “priority” was singular for centuries, and it meant the one thing that came first. Only recently did we pluralise it into “priorities,” which is essentially meaningless. You cannot have five first things. The essence of essentialism is making peace with trade-offs: if you choose to prioritise your health right now, you might have to deprioritise your career advancement temporarily. If you choose to be present for your family, you might have to let your social life shrink. If you choose to protect your sleep, you might have to lower your standards for household cleanliness. These aren’t failures, they’re necessary choices in a world with finite time and energy.

The cultural resistance to this is enormous, especially for women, who are often expected to maintain impossibly high standards across every domain simultaneously. But the maths doesn’t work. Most people cannot be excellent at their career, present as a parent, attentive as a partner, consistent with fitness, socially engaged, creative, well-rested, AND maintain a pristine home. Something has to give. The only question is whether you choose what gives, or whether your body chooses for you (usually through illness, injury, or breakdown). Essentialism isn’t about being lazy or uncommitted. It’s about being ruthlessly honest about what actually matters right now, and having the courage to disappoint people in less important areas so you can show up fully in the areas that genuinely count. The alternative of trying to do everything and doing it all poorly while destroying yourself in the process, serves no one.

 

Middle Layer 3: Bored (Understimulation or protective numbness)

Characteristics: Indifferent, apathetic, listless, disinterested, emotionally flat

Body signals: Flatness, numbness, lack of engagement, everything feels muted, disconnected

Common triggers: Lack of stimulation, repetitive tasks without variety, emotional shutdown as protection from overwhelming feelings, depression

Context note: This can mean either literal boredom (not enough stimulation) OR emotional disconnection (protective numbness after overload or trauma). These are very different, but they feel similar.

Bored is about disconnection and disengagement.

Specific emotions within Bored:

Indifferent: Lacking interest or concern; don’t care either way

Apathetic: No interest or enthusiasm; emotionally flat, can’t bring yourself to care

Listless: Lacking energy or motivation; can’t engage with anything

Disinterested: Not interested; nothing captures attention or seems worth engaging with

This branch is tricky because “Bored” can mean completely different things:

Literal boredom: You’re understimulated. Your routine is too repetitive. Nothing is engaging your interest. You need novelty, challenge, variety. This is actually relatively easy to fix – change things up, try something new, add variety.

Protective numbness: You’ve shut down emotionally because feeling would be overwhelming. This is your system’s circuit breaker; too much has been happening, and rather than stay activated and overwhelmed, you’ve gone numb. This is common after prolonged stress, in depression, and as a trauma response. This version of “Bored” doesn’t respond to adding stimulation, you need rest, processing, and often professional support.

In coaching, I see both versions regularly. A client will say they’re “bored” with their routine, and I need to figure out which kind. If it’s literal boredom, great; let’s change things up, add new exercises, or try a different approach. But if it’s protective numbness (they’re actually overwhelmed, depressed, or burned out), adding more stimulation will make things worse.

Signs it’s protective numbness rather than literal boredom:

• They used to care about this, but now they just… don’t
• They’re flat about everything, not just this one area
• They’ve been under significant stress or experienced loss/trauma
• Rest doesn’t help; they’re tired even after sleeping
• They’re disconnected from emotions generally, not just bored with routine

This is the dissociation that trauma therapists talk about; the psyche’s way of protecting itself from overwhelming experience. It’s not laziness or lack of motivation; it’s a survival mechanism.

Middle Layer 4: Busy (Frantic overactivity)

Characteristics: Pressured, rushed, frantic, hectic, no pause

Body signals: Racing, tense, breath held, no ability to slow down, jittery

Common triggers: Deadlines bearing down, over-scheduling, urgency everywhere, too many tasks, time scarcity

Busy is a specific kind of overwhelm; the frantic activation of having too much to do in too little time.

Specific emotions within Busy:

Pressured: Feeling compelled by time or demands; under the gun, have to keep moving

Rushed: Hurrying due to constraints; running out of time, can’t slow down

Frantic: Wildly busy and anxious; barely keeping up, chaotic

Hectic: Full of frenzied activity; chaotic pace, everything happening at once

Busy is what happens when the demands are urgent and time is scarce. You’re racing, you can’t stop, there’s always something else that needs to be done immediately.

This is incredibly common in modern life; people living in a constant state of Busy, where they never have enough time, they’re always behind, they’re always rushing.

From a health perspective, chronic Busy is destructive. You can’t eat well when you’re rushed, and you grab whatever is fastest. You can’t exercise consistently when you’re frantic, as there’s always something more urgent. You can’t sleep enough when you’re hectic, as there’s too much to do.

The problem with Busy is that it often feels productive. You’re doing things! You’re accomplishing! But you’re also burning out, and the quality of everything you’re doing is compromised.

What helps: Time boundaries. Absolutely ruthless prioritisation. Recognising that “urgent” and “important” aren’t the same thing (Eisenhower Matrix is super helpful for this). Building buffer time into your schedule. Accepting that you can’t do everything, while also examining why you’re chronically Busy. Sometimes it’s external demands, but sometimes it’s internal. Staying busy so you don’t have to feel, or so you feel productive, or because you’ve built your identity around being needed and busy.

Blaise Pascal wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Busy-ness is often avoidance of self.

Drained Co-Occurrences: The Exhaustion Cocktails

Drained + Fearful: The Modern Burnout

We covered this from the Fearful side; it’s the signature state of 2025, anxiety meeting depletion.

Common pairings:

• Stressed + Anxious: “Too much to do AND panicking about it”
• Tired + Anxious: “Bone-deep exhaustion but brain won’t turn off”
• Bored + Anxious: “Numb and shut down but secretly terrified”

This combination is what happens when you push past your limits for too long. You’re depleted AND activated, which is a terrible state; you need rest, but you can’t access it because your threat-detection system won’t let you relax.

Drained + Sad: The Shutdown

When exhaustion meets grief or pain, you get complete emotional shutdown.

Common pairings:

• Tired + Lonely: “Too exhausted to reach out for connection”
• Tired + Vulnerable: “No energy left to protect myself”
• Bored + Hurt: “Numbed out to avoid feeling pain”
• Bored + Guilty: “Flat affect but shame underneath”
• Bored + Lonely: “Disconnected from everyone and can’t bring myself to care”

This is concerning because it looks like “fine” on the outside; you’re not crying, you’re not visibly upset, you’re just… flat and tired. But underneath is significant pain that’s been suppressed because you don’t have the resources to process it.

This is often depression, which isn’t just sadness, it’s the complete shutdown of the system. The “dark night of the soul” that mystics and existential philosophers describe. The Christian mystic St. John of the Cross wrote about the dark night as a state where all the usual sources of meaning and comfort become inaccessible, where you’re cut off from God, from purpose, from joy, and from connection. The existentialists described something similar in the confrontation with meaninglessness, where the structures that used to organise your life collapse and you’re left staring at the void. What they’re both describing, in different language, is this profound shutdown state where your capacity to feel, to care, to connect, to find meaning has been depleted beyond the point of function.

Depression in this form isn’t sadness you can cry through or talk through. It’s the absence of feeling, the flattening of everything into grey sameness. You’re not in pain exactly, you’re nowhere. The danger is that this state can persist indefinitely because it doesn’t demand attention the way acute emotions do. You’re not screaming for help; you’re quietly disappearing. And because you look “fine” to others (you’re still going through the motions, still functioning at some minimal level) people don’t realise how deep the shutdown goes. This is why checking in matters. This is why “I’m fine” sometimes needs to be questioned. Because the Drained + Sad combination doesn’t announce itself loudly. It just slowly withdraws from life, hoping no one notices, or perhaps past the point of hoping for anything at all.

 

Drained + Angry: Burnout Rage

When depletion breeds irritability; the exhausted fury of having nothing left while demands continue.

Common pairings:

• Stressed + Frustrated: “Everything’s piling up, and I’m furious I can’t handle it”
• Tired + Frustrated: “Running on empty and the smallest things enrage me”
• Busy + Frustrated: “No time and nothing’s working, and I’m about to lose it”
• Bored + Bitter: “Checked out from accumulated resentment”

This is the irritability of burnout; when you’re so depleted that you have no patience left for anything. Small annoyances become major frustrations. Normal obstacles feel insurmountable and infuriating.

This is Goodhart’s Law applied to humans, when you optimise for productivity (the measure), actual wellbeing (what matters) gets sacrificed. The result is burnout rage. Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Originally an economic principle, it’s devastatingly applicable to modern work culture. We’ve made productivity the target (more output, more efficiency, more hustle) and in doing so, we’ve destroyed the thing productivity was supposed to serve: a life worth living. You hit your targets while your health deteriorates. You optimise your schedule while your relationships atrophy. You maximise output while your capacity for joy, rest, and meaning quietly dies. And then, inevitably, the rage comes.

Burnout rage is different from other forms of anger because it’s not about a specific violation or injustice, it’s about the accumulated exhaustion of being treated like a machine that should never need maintenance. It’s fury at a world that demands infinite capacity from finite beings. It’s the snarl that escapes when you’ve given everything and it’s still not enough, when you’ve sacrificed your well-being to meet expectations and the expectations just keep rising. This anger isn’t irrational, it’s your body’s last-ditch alarm system screaming that something is fundamentally wrong with how you’re living. 

The tragedy is that by the time burnout rage appears, you’re often too depleted to do anything about it. You’re furious, but you’re also too tired to fight, too burned out to change course, too trapped by commitments to walk away. That’s when the rage turns inward, becomes bitterness, and calcifies into “this is just how life is.” But it doesn’t have to be.

 

F. DISGUSTED: The Rejection Family (Nauseating Green)

Core signal: Contamination, moral violation, toxicity to be avoided

When Disgusted appears: You’re encountering something toxic or offensive – either physically (contamination, spoiled food, bodily functions) or morally/socially (behaviour violations, values breaches). Your system is signalling “get away from this.”

Why Disgust matters: Disgust is a protective avoidance emotion. It evolved to keep you away from sources of contamination and disease. It creates a visceral “no” response; a repulsion that makes you want to distance yourself physically and psychologically.

Paul Rozin’s research shows that disgust evolved first for food (avoiding toxins and pathogens) and was later co-opted for moral and social domains. The same facial expression (nose wrinkle, upper lip curl) appears whether you’re smelling rotten food or witnessing a moral violation.

From a coaching perspective, Disgust shows up in interesting ways around food and bodies. People feel disgusted by certain foods, disgusted by their own bodies, disgusted by perceived “impurity” or “unclean” eating. This can be cultural, can be disordered, or can be genuine intuition worth listening to.

The fitness and wellness industry has weaponised disgust in deeply harmful ways. “Clean eating” isn’t just a nutritional approach, it’s a moral framework that codes certain foods as contaminated and others as pure. We talk about “cheat meals” (moral transgression), “guilty pleasures” (shame for desire), “detoxes” and “cleanses” (purification rituals). People describe feeling “gross” or “disgusting” after eating certain foods, as if pizza or ice cream had literally contaminated them. 

This gets even darker when directed at bodies themselves. People express visceral disgust at their own flesh, their own appetites, and their own physical existence. What starts as a health goal becomes a purity crusade, and disgust is the enforcement mechanism. The problem is that disgust, unlike other emotions, doesn’t respond well to reasoning. You can’t logic your way out of finding something repulsive. This is why disordered relationships with food and body image are so resistant to change; they’ve recruited one of the most primitive and powerful avoidance systems we have.

The challenge is that disgust is sticky, and once something becomes contaminated in your mind, it’s very hard to un-contaminate it. This is the “law of contagion” from psychology: once something touches a disgusting object, it’s permanently tainted.

This is why a single bite of “bad” food can ruin an entire meal for someone with disordered eating patterns. This is why people throw away entire batches of food if they perceive any contamination. This is why moral disgust, and once you’ve decided someone is “disgusting” as a person, is nearly impossible to reverse. The contamination spreads and persists. Rozin demonstrated this with a classic experiment: people won’t drink from a glass that once held a cockroach, even after the glass has been sterilised. Rationally, they know it’s safe. Emotionally, it remains contaminated. The disgust system doesn’t care about your reasoning.

Understanding this has profound implications. If you’re trying to repair someone’s relationship with food or their body, you’re not just changing thoughts, you’re trying to reverse a contamination judgment that their disgust system has already locked in. This requires more than cognitive reframing; it requires gradual re-exposure in contexts of safety, rebuilding positive associations, and often, addressing the deeper moral frameworks that turned normal foods or normal bodies into sources of contamination in the first place. The disgust system is trying to protect you, but when it misfires and when it treats your own body or normal food as threats, it becomes a prison. Breaking out requires recognising that the “contamination” was never real to begin with.

 

Middle Layer 1: Disapproving (Moral/social judgment)

Characteristics: Judgmental, critical, contemptuous, disdainful, looking down on someone or something

Body signals: Nose wrinkle, upper lip curl (the “disgust face”), creating distance, turning away

Common triggers: Behaviour violations, moral disagreements, social transgressions, values clashes, someone doing something you find wrong or offensive

Disapproving is disgust applied to behaviour and values; you find someone’s actions or beliefs repugnant.

Specific emotions within Disapproving:

Judgmental: Forming critical opinions; finding fault, evaluating negatively

Critical: Expressing disapproval; focusing on what’s wrong or inadequate

Contemptuous: Showing disdain and lack of respect; looking down on

Disdainful: Scorn and contempt; viewing as beneath you or unworthy

This shows up constantly in fitness culture; judgment and disapproval everywhere. People are Critical of others’ bodies, food choices, and exercise habits. Contemptuous of people who are “lazy” or “undisciplined.” Disdainful of approaches that differ from their own.

It’s toxic and destructive, and it goes both ways; people judging others, but also internalising that judgment and becoming harshly critical of themselves.

When I encounter Disapproving emotions in clients (usually directed at themselves), we have to work on self-compassion. The harsh inner critic needs to soften before sustainable change can happen. Treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a friend is very helpful here. Self-judgment activates the threat system; self-compassion activates the care system.

 

Middle Layer 2: Awful (Physical revulsion)

Characteristics: Nauseated, sick, repulsed, revolted, visceral physical disgust

Body signals: Nausea, gag reflex, stomach distress, turning away, need to get away

Common triggers: Bad smells or tastes, gore or bodily functions, spoiled food, visceral unpleasantness

Awful is physical disgust; your body is revolted.

Specific emotions within Awful:

Nauseated: Feeling sick to stomach; queasiness, might throw up

Sick: Physically revolted; unwell from disgust

Repulsed: Intense aversion; driven away by revulsion

Revolted: Filled with disgust and loathing; grossed out completely

This is the most straightforward branch of disgust; actual physical revulsion from something contaminating or spoiled.

In coaching contexts, this occasionally shows up as genuine food aversions (pregnancy, illness, sensory issues) or revulsion reactions to certain exercises or environments (disgust at gym sweat/smells, etc.).

 

Middle Layer 3: Avoidant (Protective distancing)

Characteristics: Reluctant, wary, guarded, hesitant, creating protective distance

Body signals: Pulling back, creating physical distance, defensive posture, closed-off body language

Common triggers: Untrustworthy situations or people, potential contamination or harm, past negative experiences, things that feel “off”

Avoidant is disgust expressed as protective distancing – you want to get away and stay away.

Specific emotions within Avoidant:

Reluctant: Unwilling and hesitant; don’t want to engage, resistant

Wary: Cautious due to danger or problems; alert to potential threat

Guarded: Defensive in interactions; protected stance, not letting anyone in

Hesitant: Tentative and uncertain; pausing before proceeding, not sure you want to do this

Avoidant emotions are interesting because they can be protective intuition (“something feels off about this situation, I should be careful”) or they can be anxiety/insecurity disguised as disgust (“I’m avoiding this because it makes me uncomfortable”).

Learning to distinguish between these matters. Sometimes your gut is telling you something is genuinely wrong, and you should trust that. Other times you’re avoiding something because it’s hard or scary, and pushing through the discomfort would actually serve you. The challenge is knowing which is which.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, he explores how our unconscious mind processes patterns and delivers judgments faster than conscious reasoning can. The art expert who instantly knows a sculpture is fake, the marriage counsellor who can predict divorce from watching a couple interact for minutes, etc. This rapid cognition is real and often accurate, especially in domains where you have experience. Your body picks up on subtle cues like microexpressions, tonal shifts, and environmental inconsistencies, and delivers a verdict: “something’s wrong here.” That feeling of wanting to back away, that sense of “this doesn’t feel right,” is often your pattern-recognition system flagging danger before your conscious mind has assembled the evidence.

But the complication is that avoidance can also be a sophisticated defence mechanism that protects you from growth, challenge, or vulnerability. The person who feels “disgusted” by the gym might actually be afraid of being judged. The person who finds certain social situations “repulsive” might be protecting themselves from potential rejection. The person who’s “just not attracted to” certain types of people might be avoiding confronting their own biases. The emotional experience is the same, revulsion and the desire to create distance, but the source is different. One is protective intuition worth heeding. The other is fear masquerading as disgust.

The way to tell the difference is that genuine protective disgust is specific and immediate. You encounter the situation, your body reacts, and you pull away. Fear-based avoidance is broader and more persistent; it generalises, it builds elaborate justifications, and it avoids entire categories rather than specific threats. If you find yourself avoiding things that would meaningfully serve your goals or values, it’s worth questioning whether disgust is the real emotion, or whether something else is hiding underneath it.

 

Disgust Co-Occurrences

Disgust tends to be less commonly mixed with other emotions than the other families. When it does mix, it’s usually:

Disgust + Angry: Moral Outrage

• Disapproving + Frustrated: “This behaviour is both wrong AND creating obstacles”
• Disapproving + Mad: “So morally offensive, I’m enraged”

Disgust + Fearful: Threat Avoidance

• Avoidant + Threatened: “Stay away from this danger”
• Avoidant + Anxious: “Worried about contamination or harm”

 

G. SURPRISED: The Novelty Family (Electric Cyan)

Core signal: Expectation violation, attention capture, cognitive mismatch, novelty encountered

When Surprised appears: Something unexpected just happened. Your predictions were wrong. Your attention has been captured by something novel. Reality didn’t match your mental model.

Why Surprised matters: Surprise is brief but important; it reorients your attention and updates your mental models. It tells you “pay attention, something is different than expected.”

From a cognitive science perspective, your brain is a prediction machine, constantly generating expectations about what will happen next. Surprise is the signal that predictions were wrong, triggering a model update. Andy Clark and Karl Friston call this “prediction error”, where surprise is literally the mismatch between expected and actual input.

Surprise is usually positive (good news, unexpected success, pleasant surprises) or neutral (confusion, unexpected complexity). It’s the shortest-lived emotion family – surprise doesn’t last because once you’ve updated your expectations, you’re no longer surprised. You quickly shift into another emotion based on whether the surprise was good or bad.

 

Middle Layer 1: Amazed (Positive wonder)

Characteristics: Astonished, awe-struck, impressed, wonderstruck, filled with wonder

Body signals: Wide eyes, open mouth, stillness, intake of breath, sense of expansion

Common triggers: Unexpected beauty, impressive feats beyond what you thought possible, natural wonders, someone exceeding expectations dramatically

Amazed is positive surprise with a sense of wonder and admiration.

Specific emotions within Amazed:

Astonished: Greatly surprised or impressed; didn’t see that coming, blown away

Awe-struck: Filled with wonder and reverence; overwhelmed by greatness or beauty

Impressed: Favorably affected by something; admiration for achievement or quality

Wonderstruck: Filled with amazement; captivated by something marvellous

This is the emotion of witnessing something extraordinary. This is the experience Dacher Keltner studies in his research on awe: the emotion that expands our sense of what’s possible, reduces our sense of self-importance in a healthy way, and increases prosocial behaviour.

Keltner’s research reveals that awe does something remarkable to the human psyche; it temporarily dissolves the boundaries of the self. When you experience genuine awe, whether standing beneath a starlit sky, witnessing an act of extraordinary skill, or encountering vast natural beauty, your sense of being a separate, central entity momentarily dissolves. You feel smaller, but not in a diminishing way, rather, you feel part of something larger. This “small self” experience correlates with increased generosity, reduced materialism, greater patience, and more ethical behaviour. Awe literally makes us better people, through direct experience of our place in a larger whole rather than moral instruction.

We have an awe deficit in modern society. Light pollution has stolen the night sky from most of us, and billions of people have never seen the Milky Way. Our built environments are increasingly dominated by utilitarian boxes and brutalism rather than architecture that elevates the spirit. We’re disconnected from wilderness, from the ocean, from mountains, from anything that dwarfs us in scale or complexity. We spend our days staring at screens showing us content algorithmically optimised to capture attention, not inspire wonder. Even our entertainment has become mundane through over-exposure; we’ve seen so many CGI spectacles that actual remarkable things barely register.

When was the last time you were truly awestruck? Not merely impressed or entertained, but stopped in your tracks by something so extraordinary that your usual concerns fell away? If you can’t remember, that’s not a personal failing, it’s a design flaw in how we’ve built modern life. The hunger for awe doesn’t disappear; it just gets redirected toward inadequate substitutes. We doom-scroll, looking for the next dopamine hit. We chase achievement, hoping accomplishment will fill the void. But awe can’t be manufactured or optimised or consumed on demand. It requires putting yourself in the path of the extraordinary, which means seeking out nature, art, skill, beauty, and experiences that humble you. The ROI on awe is impossible to quantify, which is precisely why our productivity-obsessed culture has abandoned it. But a life without awe isn’t optimised. It’s just small. Fractured. Incomplete.

 

Middle Layer 2: Confused (Neutral bewilderment)

Characteristics: Bewildered, puzzled, baffled, perplexed, trying to make sense of something

Body signals: Furrowed brow, head tilt, searching expression, cognitive effort

Common triggers: Contradictory information, unexpected complexity, unclear situations, things not making sense

Confused is neutral surprise; you expected one thing, encountered another, and now you’re trying to figure out what’s happening.

Specific emotions within Confused:

Bewildered: Perplexed by complexity; confused and disoriented, can’t get bearings

Puzzled: Confused and trying to understand; working it out, missing pieces

Baffled: Completely unable to understand; utterly stumped

Perplexed: Mystified; can’t make sense of it, no matter how you look at it

Confusion in health and fitness is usually a sign that expectations and reality aren’t matching. An individual is Confused about why they’re not losing weight despite following the plan. Puzzled about why they feel worse despite working out more. Baffled by their lack of progress.

Usually, the remedy is information, and helping them understand what’s actually happening versus what they expected to happen. This is the teachable moment, and confusion signals readiness to learn.

 

Middle Layer 3: Excited (Positive high-arousal)

Characteristics: Eager, enthusiastic, thrilled, exhilarated, energised anticipation

Body signals: Energy surge, big smile, movement impulse, rapid speech, leaning forward

Common triggers: Good news arriving, anticipated positive events finally happening, opportunities appearing unexpectedly

Excited is high-arousal positive surprise; something good just happened or is about to happen, and you’re energised by it.

Specific emotions within Excited:

Eager: Enthusiastically wanting something to happen; anticipatory positive energy

Enthusiastic: Showing intense enjoyment and interest; fully engaged and energised

Thrilled: Extremely pleased and excited; delighted, overjoyed

Exhilarated: Energised and made joyfully excited; alive with pleasure and energy

Excitement is fantastic fuel for behaviour change, and when clients are genuinely Excited about their progress, their new routine, their goals, they show up consistently without needing external motivation.

The challenge is that excitement doesn’t last forever (it’s not supposed to), and people sometimes mistake the fading of excitement for lack of commitment or loss of progress.

This is the “motivation myth”. Motivation comes and goes, but systems and habits carry you through the low-motivation periods. You can’t rely on excitement forever.

 

Middle Layer 4: Startled (Negative/neutral shock)

Characteristics: Shocked, jolted, stunned, shaken, surprised by something unpleasant or alarming

Body signals: Jump response, gasp, freeze, adrenaline spike, heightened alertness

Common triggers: Sudden loud noises or movements, jump scares, unexpected bad news, accidents, anything sudden and alarming

Startled is brief shock, usually from something sudden and often unpleasant.

Specific emotions within Startled:

Shocked: Surprised and disturbed; really didn’t expect that

Jolted: Suddenly surprised or alarmed; shaken out of normal state

Stunned: So surprised you can barely react; speechless, frozen

Shaken: Emotionally disturbed by surprise; rattled, unsettled

Startled is usually brief, and you quickly shift into whatever emotion is appropriate to what just happened (fear if it was threatening, anger if it was offensive, etc.).

 

Surprised Co-Occurrences

Surprised + Happy: The Joy Combinations

These are feel-good mixes that happen when positive surprise combines with happiness:

• Excited + Playful: “Electric joy meeting pure delight and fun”
• Amazed + Playful: “Childlike wonder and spontaneous joy together”
• Excited + Optimistic: “Good things landing and more good things coming”

These combinations feel particularly rich and satisfying; compound positive emotions that create momentum. Like primary colours mixing to create new hues, these emotional combinations create experiences richer than either alone.

 

Surprised + Fearful: The Alarm Response

When surprise meets fear, you get startle responses and sustained worry:

• Startled + Scared: “Jump scare transitioning into sustained fear”
• Confused + Anxious: “Don’t understand what’s happening and worried about it”

 

What Emotions Actually Mean: The Logic of the Layers

Now that we’ve walked through all seven families, let me explain why they’re structured the way they are and why the emotions nest in these specific layers from broad to specific.

 

The Biological Layer: Energy and Arousal

The first layer is purely biological; your nervous system’s activation state. Before your brain has categorised anything as “anger” or “joy,” your body has already responded. Your arousal level has shifted up or down. This is the foundation, the raw material of emotion.

This is why the Triage Emotions Wheel starts by asking about energy, because that’s where emotional experience actually begins. High arousal versus low arousal. Pleasant activation versus unpleasant depletion. This isn’t subtle or interpretive, you can feel it in your body immediately.

This is interoception, which is your sense of what’s happening inside your body. Research by Lisa Feldman Barrett shows that people with better interoceptive awareness have better emotional granularity. They can detect the subtle differences in body sensation that signal different emotions.

 

The Categorical Layer: Core Emotion Families

The second layer is categorical; the seven core families that organise emotional experience based on function. Each core emotion exists because it served (and continues to serve) a specific evolutionary purpose:

• Happy: Reinforcement system – “pursue this, more of this”
• Sad: Loss signal – “something important is missing, needs attention”
• Angry: Boundary defence – “this is not okay, needs to change”
• Fearful: Threat detection – “danger present, take protective action”
• Drained: Resource monitoring – “capacity exceeded, need recovery”
• Disgusted: Contamination avoidance – “toxic, stay away”
• Surprised: Attention capture – “update your model, something unexpected”

These aren’t arbitrary categories. They’re functional systems that your brain uses to navigate the world and respond adaptively.

Now, why did I choose seven? Why not six (like some emotion models) or twenty or any other number? Because these seven capture distinct functions. You could potentially collapse some (Drained is sometimes included in Sad, Disgusted is sometimes included in Angry), but keeping them separate honours the distinct signals they send and the distinct responses they prompt.

 

The Contextual Layer: Middle Emotions

The third layer is contextual; same core emotion, different situations and causes.

This is where “Angry” differentiates into:

• Let down (trust violated by someone)
• Mad (explosive intensity)
• Frustrated (goals blocked by obstacles)
• Bitter (long-held cold resentment)

Same fundamental emotion (anger – boundary violation response), but completely different contexts and therefore different flavours, different needs, and different appropriate responses.

This layer is crucial because it starts to give you direction. If you just know you’re “angry,” you don’t know what to do. But if you know you’re “let down,” you know the anger is about broken trust, which means the issue is relational and might require conversation, boundary-setting, or ending the relationship. If you know you’re “frustrated,” you know the anger is about blocked progress, which means the issue is probably logistical and might require problem-solving or adjusting goals.

This is practical wisdom (phronesis) in Aristotle’s terms. You can’t act wisely without perceiving the situation accurately. And you can’t perceive accurately with vague categories.

 

The Precise Layer: Specific Emotions

The fourth layer is precise; the fine-grained distinctions that let you name exactly what you’re experiencing.

This is where “Hurt” (middle layer of Sad) differentiates into:

• Wounded (deep injury needing healing time)
• Offended (disrespect impacting dignity)
• Pained (ongoing suffering being carried)
• Crushed (devastating heartbreak)

These distinctions might seem small, but they matter enormously for communication and response. If you tell someone “I’m hurt,” they know you’re in pain, but they don’t know the nature of it. If you tell someone “I’m wounded,” they understand this is serious, deep, and needs space and time. If you tell someone, “I’m offended,” they understand this is about respect and dignity.

The precise layer gives you the vocabulary to communicate your internal experience accurately, which is essential for getting your needs met and for others being able to respond appropriately.

There’s something powerful about naming, as it creates relationship, understanding, and a kind of dominion. Naming your emotions gives you agency over them in a way that vague labels just doesn’t.

 

Why the Path Matters: Context-Aware Descriptions

Here’s the sophisticated part of the Triage Emotions Wheel: it tracks your path through the decision tree and gives you contextually appropriate descriptions.

The same word can appear in multiple branches with different meanings:

“Vulnerable” appears in both Sad (emotionally wounded and exposed after being hurt by someone) and Fearful-Threatened (physically exposed to danger, unprotected in unsafe situation). Same word, completely different contexts and meanings.

“Stressed” appears in both Drained (actual present overload of demands) and Fearful-Anxious (anticipatory worry about future demands). Similar feeling, different causes, different needs.

The tool knows which path you took to arrive at that word and gives you the description that matches your context. This is why it’s more sophisticated than just a list of emotion words, it’s tracking the logic of how you differentiated down through the layers.

 

What to Do With This Information: Practical Applications

Okay, so you’ve taken the Triage Emotions Wheel quiz. You’ve identified your emotion with precision. Maybe you’ve discovered you’re not just “stressed”, you’re actually “overwhelmed by demands while exhausted.” Or you’re not just “upset”, you’re “hurt and let down” simultaneously.

Now what?

 

The ABC of Emotional Intelligence

Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), created the ABC model:

• A (Activating event) → B (Belief) → C (Consequence, including emotion)

The emotion you identified is your C. But the same activating event (A) can lead to completely different emotional consequences (C) depending on the belief (B) that mediates. So once you’ve identified your specific emotion, the next question is: What belief is generating this emotion? Is that belief accurate?

If you’re feeling “inadequate” (Insecure branch of Fearful), what’s the belief? “I should be further along by now.” Is that true? According to whose timeline?

If you’re feeling “let down” (anger about broken trust), what’s the belief? “They should have kept their promise.” Is that belief about what should be getting in the way of dealing with what is?

This isn’t about invalidating your emotions; they’re real and they’re information. It’s about understanding the cognitive context that shapes them, which gives you leverage for change.

 

The ACT Perspective: Psychological Flexibility

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers a different frame: psychological flexibility.

Instead of trying to change or eliminate difficult emotions, ACT asks: Can you hold this emotion with willingness and still take action aligned with your values?

The wheel helps with the first step, as you can’t be willing toward something you can’t name. “I’m willing to feel this discomfort” is impossible when “this discomfort” is a vague blob. “I’m willing to feel this insecurity while still going to the gym” is specific and actionable.

ACT also distinguishes between “clean discomfort” (the original emotion, which is valid) and “dirty discomfort” (the suffering we add by fighting the emotion, judging ourselves for having it, or making it mean something about who we are).

The wheel helps you see the clean emotion clearly. Then you can notice when you’re adding dirty suffering on top.

 

The “What Would I Tell a Friend?” Technique

When you’re stuck in harsh self-judgment (Guilty, Ashamed, Inadequate), try asking: “If my friend felt this way, what would I tell them?” This creates psychological distance that enables more accurate assessment. We’re often much kinder and more realistic about others’ situations than our own.

If your friend skipped a workout because they were exhausted, would you tell them they’re worthless and undisciplined? Or would you say, “Your body needed rest. That’s okay. Tomorrow’s another day.”

Apply that same compassion to yourself.

 

Somatic Tracking: When Questions Don’t Work

Some people struggle with the cognitive questions, and they’re not sure how to answer “what’s my energy level?” For them, somatic tracking can help.

Start with a body scan: “Where do I feel this in my body?”

• Tight chest → often Anxious or Hurt
• Heavy limbs → often Tired or Sad
• Hot face/clenched jaw → often Angry
• Hollow feeling in chest → often Lonely
• Knot in stomach → often Anxious or Guilty
• Weight pressing down → often Overwhelmed

Your body often knows before your mind can articulate.

 

The “And” Practice

From narrative therapy comes a simple linguistic shift: Replace “but” with “and” for mixed emotions. Not “I’m proud but also scared” → “I’m proud AND also scared.”

“But” invalidates the first emotion; it suggests they can’t coexist. “And” honours both. Because they do coexist. Mixed emotions are normal. Saying “and” gives you permission to feel the full complexity of your experience.

“I’m excited about this opportunity AND I’m terrified.” “I’m angry at them AND I still love them.” “I’m exhausted AND I’m anxious about everything I haven’t done.”

Both are true. Both need space.

 

Building Emotional Vocabulary Over Time

Emotional granularity is a skill that improves with practice. The more you use the Triage Emotions Wheel, the better you get at identifying your emotions without the tool.

I recommend clients check in with it:

• Daily for a week when you first discover it (to build the habit)
• Whenever you notice “I feel bad” or “something’s off” (to identify what’s actually happening)
• In challenging situations (to understand your response)
• Periodically to track patterns (weekly or monthly)

Over time, you internalise the structure. You start automatically asking yourself, “what’s my energy level?” and “what’s the quality of this feeling?” You build a richer internal vocabulary.

If language shapes emotional experience, then different languages should make different emotional experiences possible. And they do.

 

Emotions Across Cultures: What We Can Learn

Not all cultures carve emotional space the same way. This isn’t just linguistic curiosity, it reveals different possibilities for human experience.

German gives us Schadenfreude (pleasure at others’ misfortune), Weltschmerz (world-weariness, the melancholy of existence itself), and Sehnsucht (deep, inconsolable longing for an alternative life and the path not taken).

Japanese offers amae (the comfort of depending on another’s benevolence, distinctly different from neediness), mono no aware (the bittersweet awareness of impermanence that makes beauty more poignant), and natsukashii (nostalgic longing for the past with warmth rather than sadness).

Danish has hygge, which is that cozy contentment found in simple pleasures shared with loved ones: candlelight, warm drinks, comfortable silence together.

Finnish contributes sisu, which is the extraordinary determination in the face of adversity, and a kind of courage that emerges precisely when things seem impossible.

Portuguese provides saudade, which is the deep, melancholic longing for something or someone absent, an ache that is somehow almost sweet.

Tagalog gives us gigil, which is that overwhelming urge to squeeze something unbearably cute.

These aren’t just translation curiosities or cultural quirks. Studies show that having a word for an emotion makes it easier to experience that emotion distinctly. If you don’t have a word for saudade, you might have that feeling but experience it as vague melancholy rather than the specific, bittersweet ache that Portuguese speakers know intimately.

When your emotional vocabulary expands, your emotional experience expands with it. You might find that Sehnsucht captures something you’ve felt your whole life but never named (that wistful longing for a life you didn’t live, a version of yourself you never became). Or that mono no aware names exactly what you feel watching autumn leaves fall, not just that it’s beautiful, but that the beauty is inseparable from the passing of time.

You’ve been having these experiences. You just haven’t had the words. And without the words, the experiences remained vague, blurred, half-felt. The wheel gives you 126+ English words. But consider this permission to borrow from other languages too. The emotion you’re trying to name might not have a good English word, but it might have a perfect Portuguese one.

 

Noticing Patterns

As you track your emotions over time, patterns emerge:

“I tend to land in Overwhelmed + Anxious every Sunday night. That’s anticipatory dread about the work week. Maybe I need to examine my work situation.”

“I’m frequently Tired + Lonely on weekends. I’m isolated, and it’s draining. I need more social connection.”

“I keep ending up in Frustrated + Hurt. I am running into obstacles plus feeling dismissed. There’s a pattern of my needs not being heard.”

Patterns tell you what needs attention in your life. One-off emotions are just data. Recurring patterns are signals about what’s not working. This is systems thinking; looking for the underlying structures that create recurring patterns, not just reacting to surface events.

 

The Weekly Emotional Audit

Beyond daily check-ins, there’s a more structured practice that pays enormous dividends: the weekly emotional audit.

 

Weekly Emotional Audit: A 15-Minute Practice

At the end of each week, set aside fifteen minutes and answer these five questions:

 

1. What emotions showed up most frequently this week?

List your top three to five. Be specific, not “stressed” but “overwhelmed” or “anxious” or “frustrated by blocked goals.” If you’ve been using the wheel, review your check-ins. If not, scan back through the week in your memory.

2. What patterns do you notice?

Same emotion recurring across different situations? Certain contexts that reliably trigger certain responses? Time-of-day patterns; are you always anxious on Sunday nights, always depleted by Thursday afternoon? Look for the structure beneath the surface.

3. What emotions were missing?

This question is sneaky-important. Did you experience any joy this week? Pride? Playfulness? Contentment? If positive emotions were largely absent, why might that be? Are you so focused on problems that you’re not noticing what’s working? Or is there genuinely too little in your life that generates positive emotion?

4. What did your emotions tell you about your needs?

Chronic frustration often signals blocked goals. You’re trying to do something, and obstacles keep appearing. Chronic loneliness signals connection deficit. Chronic overwhelm signals unsustainable demands. Chronic insecurity might signal you’re in environments that don’t affirm your worth. What are your emotions pointing toward?

5. What will you do differently next week?

Not a complete life overhaul. One small adjustment based on what you learned. If you were chronically rushed, can you build in one buffer? If you were lonely, can you schedule one real conversation? If you were frustrated, can you remove one obstacle or adjust one expectation?

Keep these audits. Date them, save them, let them accumulate. Over months, patterns emerge that you can’t see week-to-week. You might discover that your emotional experience follows a predictable monthly rhythm, or that certain relationships reliably leave you depleted, or that your well-being correlates almost perfectly with sleep quality.

The data becomes self-knowledge.

 

In Relationships: Using This Tool With Others

In Communicating Your Experience:

When you can name your emotions precisely, people can actually understand and respond appropriately.

“I’m feeling dismissed” (specific) is so much more useful than “I’m upset” (vague).

“I’m overwhelmed and need help prioritising” (specific + request) is more useful than “I’m stressed” (vague + no direction).

“I’m hurt by what you said and need you to understand why” (specific + need) is more useful than “you hurt me” (vague + accusatory).

 

In Helping Others Identify Emotions:

You can also use the framework to help others when they’re stuck in “I don’t know, I just feel bad.”

“Okay, let’s start with your energy; do you feel activated and buzzing, or heavy and depleted?”

“Does this feel more like sadness, like you’ve lost something, or anger, like something’s not okay?”

“When you say hurt, does it feel more like wounded (deep injury) or offended (disrespected)?”

Guiding someone through the differentiation process helps them get clarity, which is often half the battle.

 

In Validating Mixed Emotions:

When someone says they’re feeling contradictory emotions, like “I’m both angry and sad” or “I’m excited but also terrified”, validating that both make sense prevents them from feeling confused or wrong.

“Of course you’re both hurt and furious, they betrayed your trust. Both of those emotions make complete sense.”

“It makes total sense to be simultaneously exhausted and anxious, you’ve been pushing too hard for too long. Of course, your body is depleted AND your nervous system is activated.”

This validation alone can be healing because it reframes what felt like confusion or dysfunction as completely normal and coherent.

 

When Emotional Granularity Isn’t Enough

Let me be really clear about something: the Triage Emotions Wheel is a tool for identification and awareness. It helps you name what you’re feeling. It does NOT:

• Solve the underlying problem
• Treat mental health conditions
• Replace therapy or medical care
• Fix difficult situations
• Process trauma

It gives you clarity about your emotional state, which is valuable and important. But identification is just step one.

 

Red Flags Requiring Professional Support

If you’re experiencing any of these, please reach out to a mental health professional rather than trying to handle it alone with a tool:

• Suicidal thoughts or urges to harm yourself
• Feeling completely hopeless about the future for more than two weeks
• Inability to function in daily life (can’t work, can’t care for yourself, can’t maintain basic routines)
• Substance abuse as a coping mechanism
• Severe panic attacks or constant overwhelming anxiety
• Emotional numbness or detachment that doesn’t improve
• Flashbacks, nightmares, or severe trauma responses
• Persistent thoughts of worthlessness or intense self-hatred

These aren’t “I need to understand my emotions better” situations. These are “I need professional help” situations.

 

Complementary Practices

The Triage Emotions Wheel works beautifully alongside other approaches:

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Identifying emotions precisely makes CBT more effective as you know exactly which thoughts and emotions to work with
• Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT): DBT’s emotion regulation skills pair perfectly with emotional granularity
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): ACT’s willingness requires knowing what you’re being willing toward
• Somatic practices: Once you identify an emotion, somatic work helps you process it through the body
• Medication: If you have a mood disorder, medication may be necessary alongside emotional awareness work
• Coaching: A good coach can help you understand patterns and make behavioural changes based on your emotional experience

The wheel doesn’t replace these, it enhances them by giving you clearer information about your internal state.

 

When to Call a Professional

General rule: If an emotion is intense, persistent (lasting weeks), and significantly interfering with your life, that’s when to seek professional support.

Mild to moderate emotions that come and go, that you can still function through, that respond to self-care and time; you can probably work with these using awareness tools and support from friends/family/coaches.

But severe, persistent, or debilitating emotions need professional intervention. There’s no shame in that; mental health conditions are medical conditions that require appropriate treatment.

 

Triage Emotions Wheel: Your Emotional Literacy Journey

Alright, we’ve covered a lot of ground, let me leave you with some final thoughts about what this is really all about.

First and most important: emotions are information, not judgments. There are no “good” or “bad” emotions. There are pleasant and unpleasant emotions, yes. But even the most uncomfortable emotions – anger, sadness, fear, disgust – exist because they serve functions. They’re trying to tell you something important.

Anger tells you a boundary has been violated. Sadness tells you something important was lost. Fear tells you there’s potential danger. These aren’t problems to fix – they’re signals to listen to.

The Stoics understood this. They weren’t about suppressing emotion (a common misreading); they were about understanding your emotional reactions and not being enslaved by them. Epictetus: “It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.”

The problem isn’t feeling these emotions. The problem is when:

• You can’t identify what you’re actually feeling (stuck in “I feel bad”)
• The emotion is disproportionate to the situation (anxiety disorder, clinical depression)
• You’re stuck in an emotional state that isn’t resolving (chronic overwhelm, persistent despair)
• Your strategies for coping are harmful (substance abuse, disordered eating, self-harm)

But the emotions themselves? They’re just information. They’re your internal guidance system trying to help you navigate the world. Building emotional literacy means developing a relationship with your inner world; learning to listen, understand, and respond to what your emotions are telling you.

Building emotional granularity is a practice, not a one-time event. It’s checking in regularly: “What am I actually feeling right now?” It’s noticing patterns: “I always land in this emotional state in these situations; what’s that about?” It’s building vocabulary: “Oh, that’s not stress, that’s overwhelm. That’s not sadness, that’s loneliness.” It’s getting more precise over time: “I’m not just anxious; I’m specifically apprehensive about how this meeting will go.”

Like any skill, it improves with practice. The first few times you use the Triage Emotions Wheel, you might struggle to differentiate. You might not be sure which branch to choose. That’s normal. Keep practising. Over time, the distinctions become clearer, the identification becomes faster, and the vocabulary becomes more natural.

Progress, not perfection. You’re not trying to become a perfect emotion-identifier. You’re just trying to build a better relationship with your internal experience – to understand yourself more clearly so you can navigate your life more effectively.

This is the examined life that Socrates spoke of, and I would argue that examining your emotions is the foundation of examining your life. Because every decision, every relationship, every moment of meaning is saturated with emotional experience. If you don’t know what you’re feeling, you don’t know yourself.

However, identification is step one. Integration is the goal. Naming your emotions is valuable, but the real payoff comes when you can:

• Recognise patterns and make changes based on them
• Communicate your needs clearly because you understand your emotions
• Respond to situations appropriately because you know what you’re actually dealing with
• Build a life that works with your emotional reality rather than against it

This is emotional flexibility and actual emotional intelligence. The ability to experience the full range of emotions, identify them accurately, and respond adaptively based on what the situation actually requires.  It’s not about controlling your emotions or always feeling good. It’s about understanding what you’re feeling, why it makes sense given the circumstances, and what would be helpful given that emotional state.

This is what the existentialists called authenticity; living in accordance with your genuine experience rather than performing a role. Sartre said “existence precedes essence”; you’re not a fixed type, you’re creating yourself through your choices. But you can’t make authentic choices without knowing what you authentically feel.

Ultimately, better emotional granularity leads to:

Better relationship quality because you can communicate what you need instead of expecting others to guess.

Better decision-making under stress because you know whether you’re in a state to decide or need to regulate first.

Better physical health because chronic unprocessed emotional distress creates inflammation, disrupts sleep, and compromises immune function.

Better mental health because the research shows emotional granularity is protective against depression, anxiety, and problematic coping.

Better coaching outcomes because you and your coach can work with what’s actually happening instead of vague categories.

The cascade effects go far beyond the obvious.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” But examination requires tools. You can’t examine what you can’t see. You can’t navigate what you can’t name. You can’t understand what you label with vague categories.

The Triage Emotions Wheel is a tool for the examined life in the most practical sense. It takes the ancient philosophical injunction to “know thyself” and gives it structure, vocabulary, and a method. Because “I’m fine” might be the most common lie we tell, to others and to ourselves. And learning to tell the truth about our inner experience changes everything.

Name it to navigate it.

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